Wget a Plone site (and make it actually work)

// under cd content download dvd export media offline plone site static wget

There’s a lot of different resources and posts on the web about how to export a Plone site to static html content, but no methodology would actually solve all of my problems. Now, Plone is inherently a complicated beast, given just how much it does, and that’s definitely putting it lightly. But here goes at my attempt to provide an actual, workable solution. Word for the wise though, this is for more than just your front-end administrator to handle. Also, instructions are designed for Ubuntu 9.10. Mileage may/will vary on other distros or OSes.

Requirements

Needs to get all pages, including default views of folders, correctly
Needs to rewrite all links to be relative, because I want to run the site locally on CD/DVD (or move it anywhere)
Should get all the CSS from the site, and images from the CSS
Doesn’t have to be in 1 command (relaxed to make life easy ;-) )

How to

Issues I’ve had with other methods (specifically, wget options) either don’t get the right pages, manage to ignore default folder views, or other random problems. Here’s my take on the situation — it’s not a one-click solution, but it worked for me:

Go into your site and change all portal_css entries’ Render Type to ‘Link’. This solves issues with wget and @import for CSS.
Make invisible any actions in portal_actions that you don’t want saved. For example, “Register” and “Contact” might want to be hidden as they won’t be useful on a static site.
When ready, run the following script on your site (thanks to kiilerex for the wget command): https://github.com/jcu-eresearch/static-plone-wget
Looking inside the bash script, you’ll see uses wget to download the site, then gets a list of images referenced within the CSS files, and downloads them accordingly to the location where the CSS file(s) are. Then, it corrects your CSS files to have relative URLs, rather than absolute as does Plone by default.
Your site should now be ready for distribution to any web location or distribution media!

Please let me know if there’s any problems with the script. It’s on GitHub at https://github.com/jcu-eresearch/static-plone-wget so go crazy and fork as you’d like.

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