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Comment by mjnaus | Hacker News Reader

A service combining the flexibility and ease of use of a CMS site (Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla, etc) with the speed and security of a static HTML site.

The CMS version would be a private site (not accessible by the general public) which is compiled into a static HTML site which is publicly accessible.

There should be a way to deal with formerly dynamic elements, such as contact/comment forms, site search, etc. (possibly using third party APIs)

There also should be a way to deal with updates to the CMS version of the site, so that these changes are detected, compiled and processed into the static version of the site.

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This might also be similar to what you're looking for? http://jekyllrb.com/

EDIT: Oh sorry, I didn't realize that Prose was based on Jekyll! I guess this suggestion is a bit redundant, but this way you don't need Github if you have your own server, I guess.

I'm currently working on a Haskell web framework that allows one to easily define all of the possible values dynamic content can take, generate all permutations of content (assuming the values are finite), and load them all into an in-memory cache to be fired off, pre-baked. Inspired by the idea of a pure function -- that is, a function that is given the same arguments should always return the same result (and have no side effects).

More general than a CMS, but the idea is similar.

I think Movable Type does this http://movabletype.org/

I'm not sure if this fits all your needs but there seems to be at least some meaningful overlap:

http://developmentseed.org/blog/2012/june/25/prose-a-content...

These solutions seem to, kinda, take a stab at the concept, but what we're really after is something way simpler. Think a simple text field into which you type a URL. Then this service would visit, crawl and compile the entire site into a static HTML site (with options to enhance the final version of the static site).

This would have to work independently of the platform used to build the original site and ideally the service would also provide a means of getting the newly created static site onto it's hosting platform (be it Dropbox, Digital Ocean or whatever other platform you want to host the static site).

Httrack does this.

Yep, they do. However not as a service. With Httrack, I'd need to download their software first, and then run it whenever the site's been updated. I'd like a online service that handles it all for me.

It would be trivially easy to put the front end on HT track.

wget --convert-links -r http://www.gnu.org/ -o gnulog ?

It's been on my mind to create a WP plugin which allows you to upload a static version of the entire site to another location. Do you think that would do the trick?

It kinda would, however it would be limited to Wordpress. I'd like something that works with whatever CMS/platform the site's build on.

Are you thinking of something similar to http://cloudcannon.com/?

No, not really. CloudCannon allows you to build static websites on Dropbox (if I'm not mistaken). What I'm after is means of building and maintaing a site using your CMS of choice (Wordpress, Drupal, etc) and then have this site compiled into a static HTML site (on request or using some sort of timer/interval) and uploaded to wherever I'm planning to host it.

Looking to get away from the speed and security issues of CMS based sites but still having the flexibility and ease of use when building/maintaining a site. Basically using any CMS to build and deploy static HTML web sites.

Maybe try looking into Grow? http://preview.growsdk.org/

Although Grow looks very cool, it doesn't allow me to use any given CMS (Wordpress, Drupal, etc) to build static HTML sites.

I'm building a service that's something like that. Ping me if you are interested in a demo hi @ !dotfinity! . !eu!

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