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A friend of mine is investigating the use of WordPress for a dynamic site with some hierarchy. Really, at the moment he just wants "nothing fancier than photos and links between pages," but knowing him, it's going to get more complex from there.

The tricky requirement, though, is that he needs to be able to archive the site. As in, output a static HTML version with embedded resources (photos) to a CD for manual distribution from time-to-time.

I'm pretty sure this is possible with WP, since that's actually how several caching systems work. But I don't know of any plugins that give you a simple "export site to disc" function. Is there such a plugin?

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Why would you want a website on a CD? – Doug Nov 14 '11 at 15:04
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We used to work together at a Boy Scout camp in the woods. There's frequently a lack of Internet access, but the resources hosted on the site are still needed. So being able to dump a navigable HTML version of the site to a CD for offline access is a must. – EAMann♦ Nov 14 '11 at 16:56

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Turn on pretty permalinks, and run a spider/archiver on the address of your website. This should give you a static site you can place on a CD/DVD/USB drive.

You can use a tool such as http://www.httrack.com/ to do the latter part. If you're on linux you can use the following command:

# Mirror website to a static copy for local browsing.
# This means all links will be changed to point to the local files.
# Note --html-extension will convert any CGI, ASP or PHP generated files to HTML (or anything else not .html).
wget --mirror -w 2 -p --html-extension --convert-links -P <dir> http://www.yourdomain.com

You can also run a portable wordpress install off of a USB drive http://wordpress-portable.webnode.com/

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Wordpress Portable would need you to launch the Web and database servers when you'd like to browser the content, and probably wouldn't work for CDs because they are read-only. But HTTrack / Wget would work in any setup -- they're just static HTML pages. – tricasse Oct 3 '12 at 15:37
Nobody bothers with CDs anymore, most new machines don't have them, and USB drives are supported by everything and dirt cheap – Tom J Nowell Oct 3 '12 at 16:55
My comment was posted only to add some precisions to your answer and help the OP and readers. But relating to CDs/USB keys, the OP says he needs this "at a Boy Scout camp in the woods", so he might need this on old computers, or have a low budget for distribution (and CDs are still way cheaper than USB keys), and most computers do have CD/DVD drives still (not tablets of course). – tricasse Oct 4 '12 at 16:17
My Windows 98 AMD K6 machine with 32mb ram had 2 USB ports, I'm sure any machine that doesn't support USB keys is going to struggle to render WordPress pages, static or otherwise. – Tom J Nowell Oct 4 '12 at 16:33
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You might want to give this tutorial a try:

http://mossiso.com/2009/07/20/convert-wp-to-static-html-part-2.html

There is also a script you can run via command line

http://mossiso.com/code/make-wordpress-static

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