MakeStaticSite provides a range of functionality to manage the creation and deployment of static versions of a number of websites, all in one area. It does so in a way that enables you to continue your existing website construction and authoring methods.

Getting started is not burdensome:

• Lightweight — the bundled distribution is less than 150K in size.
• Easy to install with very few prerequisites and then once downloaded, just run the script.
• A straightforward command line interface.
• A setup script that guides users through the creation of a configuration file through a simple interactive dialogue; manual editing is not required. Choose from three run levels, ranging from minimal to advanced, to determine the amount of customisation.

Flexible customisation:

• The target website can be hosted on one domain, whilst including assets such as JavaScript, CSS and images from other domains and subdomains.
• If the website is a directory, then assets on the same domain, but outside the directory, can similarly be properly incorporated, thereby aiding portability.
• Multiple sites can be managed, each with custom settings defined in their own configuration file (and multiple config files can also be used for any given site).
• Suitable for batch processes, allowing operations to be scaled up so that any or all of the sites are updated in one process.
• Support for HTTP basic authentication and CMS web form logins, with credentials management. This paves the way for converting your existing site whilst maintaining the WordPress installation in situ.
• Support for sites archived by the Wayback Machine.
• Runtime options, such as verbosity, to configure the level of output; and whether to archive each build.
• Option of providing a downloadable copy of the entire site as a zip file which can be used offline, e.g., off a memory stick, making your site portable.
• Local and remote (server) deployment options, including rsync over ssh and Netlify.
• For WordPress installations, WP-CLI is used to prepare the site for mirroring plus a drop-in search replacement (WP Offline Search plugin) that works offline.
• Snippets — an experimental facility to tweak any page and provide offline variants using chunks of HTML.
• Support for custom attributes using post-processing – by creating a list of URLs unaccounted for and then re-running Wget on them
• W3C standards compliance. Whilst this really depends on the source, pages may be cleaned up by HTML Tidy. The system also generates a sitemap XML and robots.txt file to match the outputted files.

Of course, the more we see its capabilities, the more we see its limitations…