from my experience with another project i just can say that static html output is trickier than i expected (hint: you have neither a request nor a path object).

yeah, i know. still it has been done & it can be done...

i'm doing that all the time. just spidering the blog with wget or something of that ilk, with apropriate parameters, is all you need to do. for a full text search in the static pages, you have to grep of course, and you can't do anything that requires pushing a button, but all other links work perfectly, i.e. you can browse the stories by topic, calender, amd blog.

It's not the functionality we're talking about here. We're talking about push-button remote publishing, not running wget after each update and ftp-ing the result to some remote server.

Still, just out of curiosity, what parameters do you use for wget to get a full browsable archive?

Regarding the parameters: I did that for a particular project, where I used Antville to keep a project log. I left my backup copy of that project, err, somewhere, I'll look that up as soon as I have it back and post it here. But it wasn't very sophisticated, it grabbed, for example, the edit page for every story. It was basically a standard recursive spider starting at the front page that converted 'internal' links to point to the local copy.

You're right, if you want to do it after each update, it's a different story. What I proposed could be done at the push of a button, but of course it would be inefficient to re-run the whole process for every update. And the primitive version I actually used is far from perfect, too.

oops, just saw your comment now. As I said below, I think the right approach would be to start from zero with a new group of "remote skins" rather than leaving away stuff from the existing "local" ones.

I do not intend to change the existing functions, just add the functionality to publish static sites via ftp.

I'm going to give it a try next week.

actually, the functionality of static pages is almost identical to what a user who isn't logged in gets. when i spider a blog for archival purposes, i make sure it's at public (taking it offline if there's anything secret in it) and that the spider isn't logged in. to make that perfect, you'd just have to leave away the search feature and the log-in link and ... what else?

nex, the idea is to do this with inside functionality instead of using 2 outside programs to achieve it.

I hope (suppose, actually) you don't mean that you're generally afraid of using external tools and are willing to waste time and effort on implementing functionality that already exists a second time for the xenophobic sake of avoiding "outside programs".

Of course, you could surely find functionality that would have to be newly created because it could not be achieved with with existing wget-like tools. I guess you want to extend Antville so you at least have buttons in apropriate places for the FTP publishing. If you want to make your tool available to other users, it would probably also be a good idea not to rely on external tools that not everyone has. But if all you want to do is put a static copy of your site on-line, all you actually have to create is a skin set that looks okay with it (i.e. no 'comment' links etc.).