Hi all,
Could you recommend me some tool (not online one) to monitor html changes in website or to get complete snapshot of a website?
My task is to migrate current website to the next version of CMS. Migration requires code changes as well, because of new API. The idea is to make snapshot of the website before migration and after. After that I will compare two snapshots and see if migration went OK.
Thanks
Screen grabs (images)
As your web pages may well extend the visible area of your browser window, you'll need a specialized tool for this. For Firefox, I have made some good experiences with Fireshot. It's not fully automatic though.
Copy of the full HTML structure
For an automated solution, have you considered downloading a complete mirror of the web site? I don't mean the old CMS, but the generated HTML output including all style sheets and scripts. Any dynamic functionality would be lost of course, but it should be possible to create a running, local HTML copy of the whole thing that way. I have used GetLeft in the past. Just be sure everything gets downloaded and there are no references to the online version left anymore.
Why don't you make a copy of the entire website folder and after making the changes use beyondcompare to see what has changed. It has a filter to show only differences which will give you what you need (files that changed).
If you're migrating from one CMS to another, then content is most likely in a Database. Just dump the DB at the desired points, then build quick import script to pull in content and map any changes in DB fields.
Not too long ago I moved a site from an old PERL based CMS to a much nicer Zend Framework-based custom CMS. While the DB tables were quite different, every CMS seems to have commonalities such as Title, Content, Blurb, etc fields. It's just a matter of identifying what matches, building the import script, and running. Once the quick script is written, you could pull in updates in the same manner, allowing you to run a beta of the new code and quickly importing updates that might happen between first import and immediately prior to launch of new codebase.