Word press round 2

[Timothy Stowell]

While reviewing other posts on Word Press, I came across a post on Discuss list that had no responses.  So I wrote the person to ask one statement made in their post.  I also asked and got permission to post a copy of a portion of their original post plus their answer to me in response to my question about their original post.

The poster is a CC.

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part of original post:

During their debating there are two big downsides that come up. One
is, once a CC is allowed to change a site to Wordpress format, it will
be extremely hard to return it to HTML. Coincidentally, I have just
discovered a free WordPress plugin that automatically does that, so I
wanted to mention it: "wordpress.org/plugins/simply-static/"

The other big downside everybody mentions is how hard it is to change
a site from HTML to Wordpress in the first place.
I have completely re-done 3 counties in the past year or so, and even
a regular HTML site is a bunch of work! Because I found that I could
change a site back to HTML so easily, I have decided to try one with
Wordpress, locally on my computer.


Randy Cummings
CC Boundary, Bonner, Shoshone IDGenWeb
Lincoln MTGenWeb
Ashtabula OhGenWeb

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My question to him was about his last statement - and his response below - 

Honestly your first question is tough, mainly because I hardly
understand what I was trying to say in my last sentence. As usual, I
think there was a lot more going on in my head than came out on paper.

It has been awhile, and because no one seemed interested when I posted
it I didn't keep any notes on the process.

I did create a blank wordpress Astabula.OhGenWeb on my computer
locally and I tried to import the existing html Ashtabula site into it
using a different plugin that I didn't even mention in my post. I
would say that that didn't really work in a way that I found
beneficial. But I think maybe that is a different discussion.

As far as exporting the wordpress site to html format, with the
"simply-static" plugin mentioned, that did work, but I only did a
small trial. Fortunately, this morning I was able to pull that trial
HTML site out of the trash bin on the OHGenWeb server, so you can see
it. http://dev.ashtabula.ohgenweb.org/

Aside from the homepage, before the export I had only created one
page, the "about us" page, which is linked on the extreme right of the
main menu. All the rest of the links were going back to the original
Ashtabula site that was live at the time and is gone now.

The thing I was surprised to see this morning was that the light-box
feature was exported from my local wordpress with the html package
too. If you click on an image it zooms in.

The big drawback is that because the wordpress URLs are fancy modern
ones without the ".html"  IE. just a slash "/" the simply-static
plugin creates a folder "about-us" with an index.html in it, that
means you end up with a bunch of folders with just an index in them.
So, on the Ashtabula site, I have restored a little over 100 pages so
far, that would be over 100 folders with one index.html in it.

So, I guess as far as this being useful to an SC to bring a site back
to html, I am not sure that some other manual ways might not work just
as well. As a matter of fact, I used "DownThemAll" to suck the pages
for Ashtabula off of the rootsweb server because they had maybe 10
times more than OHGenWeb had of the old pages, so DownThemAll may even
end up a better choice for the SC.

Sorry for such a long answer, and I hope I got to the point you were
looking for, I will be happy to try and clarify, if you have more
questions.

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So all that said, any further thoughts?

Tim Stowell