Make Me Static, Static Site Generator, Git, Pages and Live Stats

Welcome to the Make Me Static Plugin for WordPress. This plugin is a static site generator and aims to create and maintain a static copy of your WordPress website within a Git repository. This version includes automatic access to a free Git solution and Page provider platform. (so no setup or credentials are necessary)

Alternatively the static site can be generated and stored in a GitLab Git Repository that can be used as a source for a static page platform such as CloudFlare Pages. The plugin provides customised sitemap and change tracking which connects to an external crawling service which does all the heavy lifting.

We have made great efforts in this version to minimise the configuration required to get going, if you have any problems (with anything) please let is know and we’ll do our best to help. Check out this YouTube video for an introduction to static front-ends and a walk-through of converting a pre-existing WordPress site into a WordPress site with a static front-end.

How the service works

The plugin connects to a directory service on the Internet at one of the directory URL’s listed below. This in turn will point the plugin to a ‘crawler’ that has been allocated to your site.
When you ask the plugin to make a static copy of your site, it will instruct the crawler to visit all the pages on your site to determine which have changed since it’s last visit. Any changed pages will be copied to a Git repository, which in turn can publish pages directly to a page hosting service.

The default option is to use a Git account hosted by MadPenguin, and to publish the site on MadPenguin’s page hosting platform. As a result the default options do not require any specific Git or Page hosting configuration to get going. If on the other hand you choose to use a hosted Git service such as GitLab, you will need to enter some credentials for your online account, and from there configure your GitLab account to publish to a page hosting service.

Once you have successfully published a static copy of your site, all you need to do is point your domain at the address of the page hosting service, and asssuming your domain matches the one you
entered when setting up your profile within the plugin, you should be up and running.

The service retains a metadata database for the site which includes file names, sizes and modification times, together with any credentials that have been added when creating a profile. (Sensitive credentials and other information is encrypted at rest). The external service is responsible for all scanning and processing activities to mitigate strain on the WordPress server.
The only private data transferred to the external service is the information you enter when creating a profile. All other information is obtained via an anonymous external scan, hence publically available. If you have selected the default Git option, then the service will also retain a static copy of the site.

Useful references

• The service product page
• Terms and Conditions of Service
• Privacy Policy
• Getting Started
• Service Status
• Support Forum

Make me static directory service URL’s;

• https://mms-directory-1.madpenguin.uk
• https://mms-directory-2.madpenguin.uk
• https://mms-directory-3.madpenguin.uk

Other URL’s used to load code;

• https://assets.makemestatic.com, source for stage-2 crawler UI
• https://status.makemestatic.com, endpoints that indicate the currently deployed version of a site
• https://weblogs.makemestatic.com, source for dynamically loaded weblogs data / websockets
• https://mms-crawler-*.madpenguin.uk, location of the actual crawlers (via websocket)

Note that this in an integrated solution, the 3rd party crawling service is owned and operated by the plugin authors on a combination of cloud hosted and on premesis equipment.

Live Web Statistics (experimental)

If you opt to use the integrated Pages platform, this also provides a live WebStats option that uses the following URL;

• https://weblogs.makemestatic.com

This allows live webstats to be seamlessly delivered into your control panel and updated in real-time via a websocket connection. Do not use this URL directly!
This URL is only referenced once you click on the webstats icon next to your profile.

How Does it work?

The WordPress site is scanned by the MMS service under direction from the WordPress plugin. This off-loads the scanning process to specialised software which aims to minimise the loading on the WordPress server while scans are in progress.

There are three types of scan that can be performed;

• An “update”, which literally only looks at entries with changed sitemap timestamps
  (this is very quick and great for typo’s and any changes that only affect a single page)

• A “synchronise”, typically this will scan every asset on the WordPress site and compare a checksum of each asset against it’s database to see if it’s changed since the last scan. Any changes are then transferred to the connected Git repository.

• A “Git verification”, this is like a “synchronise”, but also scans the Git repository for assets that are no longer referenced by the site (and removes them).

As the site is scanned “from the outside” there should be no risk of the plugins actions exposing any data that isn’t already public. By the same token the external service has no ability to modify WordPress so the security footprint of the plugin is tiny.

Feature bullet points

• The plugin provides a way to produce a static copy of your website in a git repository
• The result is compatible with both Github pages and CloudFlare pages for automatic publication
• Multiple profiles are supported for (A+B_…) testing
• Various scan rates are supported from one page per 5s to 7 cores flat out
• Scheduled updates are supported and automated scanning
• Currently “Gitlab” is supported with plans for GitHub and on-prem Gitlab
• Support push services (WebPushr) to automatically notify subscribers on scan completion
• Issue tracker for each profile to diagnose problems
  • Handles current and historical issues
  • Ability to acknowlede or delete issues when resolved
• GUI access to the internal asset database
  • Search as you type filtering
  • Pinning (force assets to be scanned regardless of perceived change)
  • Selective / manual queueing of assets for testing
• Ability to include manual / static assets in the scan (in the WP tree but unmanaged by WP)
• Ability to exclude specific files and folders
• Setup Wizard is included for a guided profile creation

The Technology

• The Plugin presents as a WordPress Admin / plugin page
• Backend connections are made over websockets using PKI
• The crawler respects Robots.txt, (make sure the “MMSbot” agent is allowed on your site)
• MMS Javascript runs in an isolated module and CSS “plays nice” with WordPress
• Global CSS and theming is partitioned and user editable (if you feel the need …)
• All of the front-end JS code and PHP is either GPL2 or MIT licensed
• Backend-code is all based on the Orbit Framework (the framework and DB are all MIT licensed)
• Orbit is a ‘real time’ framework, so the admin panel is 100% reactive.
  • Progress bar updates are typically “per percent” granularity
  • All statuses, totals, etc, are updated as they happen
  • Unless you’ve hit a bug, there is no mileage in reloading the MMS plugin page
  • If you change your license information, it will change in real-time
  • If the crawler allocated to your site changes (perhaps due to a license upgrade) then the
    appropriate version of the crawler UI will be uploaded “into” the page from the new
    crawler.