Making an entire website available offline?

Question

Consider this scenario:

I could use a CMS, say Wordpress, to create a product catalogue, where my products are effectively tagged and categorised for ease of navigation. For employees and customers, this would provide an effective and visual means to browse a catalogue of products.

The problem with this is that it requires a connection to the internet to serve up the information. There could be many situations where the users of this catalogue are not connected to the internet, but still need to browse the catalogue - like field sales staff, for example.

How then, is it possible to make this entire site available for viewing (and distributing) offline? It would need to function exactly as the internet-connected version, serving up the same information and images.

Is it possible!?

I guess the limitation is the the WP database serves up the info and that would require everyone to have a MAMP-type installation, with Wordpress on their machines?

Answer 1

You could create a static mirror of the site eg wget -km http://DOMAIN . Package that into an archive and get them to install a new archive whenever it's been updated.

Answer 2

If you need it to function exactly, like you mentioned, you might want to check out XAMPP. It is a package containing an apache webserver, mysql, perl and php. It is not required to be installed before being used, but it does require starting the components which could probably be scripted.

The downside is you will need to customize this version unless you want to include all your information in the catalogs. Also, since your current server likely has different modules than what comes standard with XAMPP this could lead to having to basically maintain two versions of the site.

Answer 3

If you don't need the databases to sync (eg portable POS systems), MAMP is a great solution. I've implemented this several times in cases where field agents required web-based promo materials. Easy to update, maintenance free, small learning curve. MAMP all the way.

Answer 4

I'm developing a Wordpress site, mirrored locally under http://localhost . I'm able to transfer the database with a simple plugin that handles backup, then before I load locally I remap the URI strings inside the SQL. Being PHP serialized, some care is needed to keep the string size aligned. Ie change each occurrence of s:N:"...http://your_site/" to s:M:"...http://localhost/your_site/", with M = N + 10.