Joomla to Static HTML website

Question

Hi,

I have a Hindi magazine website hosted on Joomla. Though helpful from publishing point of view the site was a maintenance nightmare. Joomla is so much susceptible to hacker attacks. My host will often shut down my site due to bots attacking my website. Recently I relaunched the site as a new Wordpress based site on a different name. The Joomla based website would therefore never be updated anymore. However, I do want to maintain the old content. I have used PHP but hardly am a power user.

I want to convert the files as plain HTML. I created a mirror of the website using HTTrack. But thanks to the fact that Joomla had variety of URLs for the same page (if you used a SEF URL plugin you would understand) the mirror is full of redundant content. Moreover I have repetitive HTML content (for header,footer,menu etc) in each page.

My questions are:

1. Which is a better option, create a static HTML site or PHP4.x pages (with Unicode content and having include PHP fragments for repetitive content)?
2. If latter is better should I use template system like Smarty? I am worried about caching since the content will hardly be updated I want caches to last forever.

Thanks for the help.

Answer 1

If the content is not going to change frequently I recommend using HTML files. They are static and hence faster.

However, if you are going to be updating content frequently, then you can either upgrade to the latest version of any popular CMS preferably joomla or drupal. I cite these two because they are actively developed and you can get a lot of support for them on the internet. Be sure to follow their security guide for hardening your installation.

Answer 2

If I were you I'd move everything over to WordPress since you have started using this. This way you will be maintaining a single website application keeping things better manageable in the long run.

You can copy the data out of Joomla using the Joomla administration interface. Or maybe even quicker using a database tool like MySQL Tools or Navicat which has a lot of export options.

Copying the HTML from Joomla using tools like HTTrack or TelePort Pro will result in lots of duplicate code and pages like you state.

Maintaining an extra PHP site just for the old content will be as much effort as getting everything into WordPress.