Converting a Drupal Site to Straight HTML

When Bad Hosts (Yahoo Small Business) Happen to Good Drupal Sites

Time and again, I work for a client who is stuck with a horrid server environment -- say -- Yahoo Small Business.* Surely you must think that a company like Yahoo -- who employs none other than Rasmus Lerdorf -- would offer a decent environment. That's where you'd be wrong.

Its so bad that Drupal 6 won't even allow itself to ATTEMPT an installation. And with good reason. Consider the facts:

• PHP version 4.3.11 -- (I wonder if there have been any important security fixes since that version came out?)
• MYSQL version 3.23.49 (Remember 2002?)
• Register globals is ON -- this is a "feature" and there ain't a damn thing I can do about it.
• No support for mod_rewrite [meaning all pages on the site have to begin with "?q="]
• 20m Memory limit (32 pushes it depending on what image handling modules you have on... views and panels seem to want more than 32 too)

It seems like its not even worth the effort to try to get drupal to run there. Since the site has to be live on monday, I employed a crude method that gathers all URL aliases, and a few more paths, and generates a full tree of directories and index.php files to mirror the pathauto links. Break the glass, and use this in case of emergency. [its best to run this on a local machine, btw -- it takes a while, and you'll want to turn up max page execution time up to near 120 seconds and beyond for most sites in the php.ini files.

<?php
// this function will dump the html in a file called "exports" in your files directory
because_yahoo_hosting_sucks();
function because_yahoo_hosting_sucks() {
$output = 'test';
$sql = db_query("SELECT dst FROM {url_alias}");
$count = 0;
while($result = db_fetch_object($sql)) {
/// use absolute paths with drupal_http_request
$response = drupal_http_request(url($result->dst, array('absolute' => true)));
// result->data is the actual page
$output .= drupal_to_html($result->dst, $response->data);
$output .= "";
$count++;
}
// couple of pages left out of the aliased table
$more = array(
'contact',
'case-studies'
);
foreach($more as $url) {
$response = drupal_http_request(url($url, array('absolute' => true)));
$output .= drupal_to_html($url, $response->data);
$output .= "";
$count++;
}
$output .= "";
// be on the lookout for pages with incorrect paths, and debug at will...
$output .= "wrote ".$count." crappy html files because yahoo sucks...";
print $output;
exit();
}

function drupal_to_html($url, $page) {
// only creates a directory if there's a file for the directory.
// this can be fixed, but only bugged me in 1 or 2 pages.
$path = file_create_path('export/'.$url);
file_check_directory($path, FILE_CREATE_DIRECTORY);
// we add index.php because of pathauto urls
file_save_data($page, $path .'/index.php', FILE_EXISTS_REPLACE);
return $path.'/index.php';
}

// now weep at your dreamweaver site
?>

Tips

• Clear cache, and turn on css and JS propagation, files/js, files/css to to the same relative path as it is on your drupal install
• lrn2use version control - it makes dealing with themes, files, and images much easier in this sad scenario

Notes

• Yes, I thought of recommending they switch hosts... they need the site live on monday, and have 80-100 email address on their yahoo domain that can't stop working...
• Yes, I know you can route mail to one IP, and web traffic to another IP. Guess what? They don't have their own IP.
• And, they bought the domain using yahoo, so they have no control over it anyhow. Its either all traffic to them, or all traffic somewhere else.