Sometimes we have the challenge to archive an older Drupal website. It is not necessary to have a fully functional interactive archive. For that reason I tried the module HTML Export.
The idea is simple: The module creates a html page for every Drupal page which is visible for a guest.
If you have a multisite installation with a multilingual drupal it's a bit more complicated, because HTML Export doesn't work well with these things :-( I haven't found a real solution for everything but I did the following:
- installed a local mamp.
- built an exact copy of our productive environment. In that case it was an old Drupal 5 website - http://drupal5.cocoate.com. This was a multisite with a lot of websites into the sites folder. I deleted all the other websites' folders so that only /sites/drupal5.cocoate.com remains. I created a default folder for the necessary settings.php. It would also be possible to create Apache Server Aliases in httpd.conf but this pragmatic solution was easier for me.
- deactivated the I18N module and set the primary language to German. In another case I set the primary language to English, so I could export the English version.
- inserted the domain name in the hosts file.
- inserted a <VirtualHost> Container in the local httpd.conf
- changed php.ini to have no timeouts
- exported the website in Drupal using HTML Export
uploaded it to our new little archive - et voilà - ready :-)
See the result: http://drupal5.archive.cocoate.com
2 comments
[UPDATE] much better solution
I have just tried httrack.
It's just working perfectly and so much easier than the HTML Export Solution ... !
Thank you Jürgen :-)
hmm
Just tried httrack and sitesucker.
The first impression was "WOW - how easy". Until the old site is up, you can access the correct css files. But when you deactivate it ... the css paths are wrong.
Again no real solution :-(
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