Transferring a website to CD

Anyone know the best way to do this?

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

Does anyone know a foolproof way of copying a website to a CD. One of my clients has asked for this and I can see problems with relative/absolute links, etc.

Any tips?

Is there a cheap software solution to this?

[directrix]

If you use Javascript (or even an IE expression in the css) on the site you should check out this recent thread: IE6 SP2 and local "security" [webmasterworld.com]

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

Thanks Directrix, I'll make a note of that.

If this job comes off however the client would be willing to pay for an easy to use software solution. His website content changes regularly and he would want to be able to do this himself.

[tedster]

I started the thread linked above. I did a good bit of research, but I never saw an application that would burn a website to CD.

The final solution for us was to embed a server on the CD. So many problems just go away with that approach, and you can have not only javascript, but Perl, PHP and MySQL as needed. It's really easy once the server is configured -- just make sure the config is exactly what you need (done once) and then copy the website files into htdocs folder, or replace them whenever an update us done.

As you've noted, any absolute links that point to an online domain will need to be changed for the CD to function in a self-contained manner -- a relatively easy job for any application that does extended search and replace over multiple folders, as long as you are embedding a server on the CD.

Without the embedded server, the url conversion would require more detailed attention, because you can't just begin a URL with a forward slash and have it work. So you need to change over to relative urls by changing the absolute urls in one subdirectory at a time.

[TerryG]

If i read this right, I use netscape 7.2 and what i do for some of my customers if the site is on the web is use the save as function on each page and save it to disk.
this function not only makes a sub dir for graphics but one for files .
now if it has a link to an outside file i must go to that site and get the file and add it.
once this is done ( and its easy to do) i run through it with a pc version of grep looking for http or what ever ,just looking at the code, once this is done i copy the complete directory to cd and it runs fine and had to do this many time for people.