task Generating Static Archives of Legacy Drupal 6 Websites

Despite its popularity, especially among nonprofits and government agencies in DC, we rarely ever chose Drupal as our go to CMS. We prefer other products. Nonetheless, our expertise as PHP and LAMP developers allow us to work on Drupal sites all the same, and we have been brought on board to modify, maintain and improve a significant number of Drupal sites created by other parties. In most cases, these have been Drupal 6 websites for organizations unable to upgrade to a newer version of the CMS. But as Drupal 6 reached its end-of-life (EOL) in February, simply leaving a D6 site up isn't a good option. EOL means that the version is no longer maintained or supported by the Drupal development team and that the risk of security issues starts to rise, especially for sites that rely on third-party modules. Recognizing this, we've offered our clients routes to archive D6 sites that they consider legacy and don't want to upgrade. This week we've worked on archiving three such sites, which entails using a variety of dynamic scraping techniques to convert the Drupal sites into more secure, static versions. This will allow the organizations to keep their sites and make them publicly available for historical needs without any significant future maintenance responsibilities (e.g., applying website security updates, patches etc).