Contemporary Zen practice in Russian (and a bit of English).

(Static mirror)

When the main site https://zen-do.ru/ does not work, come here:

(Work in progress)

How to convert articles from Joomla (or other DB-based engine) to Static HTML files, in folders according to categories structure:

(1) Export articles from the database.

For example, with phpMyAdmin export Joomla site table <prefix>_content to JSON file articles.json. Edit that file manually as needed (or modify its processing script). Raw exported file:

[
{"type":"header","version":"4.8.3","comment":"Export to JSON plugin for PHPMyAdmin"},
{"type":"database","name":"joomla"},
{"type":"table","name":"my1_content","database":"joomla","data":
[
{"id":"1", ...},
...
]
}
]

Edited:

{"id":"1", ...}
{"id":"2", ...}
...

(2) Run extract.php from this repository, it would read the JSON file line by line, writing the data in separate HTML files, with directory structure according to that web site categories. See extract.php for details and edit it to set the options (input file name, output directory, categories names).

(3) Run wrap.sh to wrap the files into static HTML template (header & footer, see /tpl).

• Input files directory "/in",
• output files directory "/docs".

(4) ToDo: Automatically list articles in categories, show them as blogs etc. I think just static HTML + AJAX should work fine. Also GitHub actions could help to minimize data processing, by updating info on git pull events (e.g. creating lists of files in categories; lists of articles belonging to particular authors).

As pages URLs in Joomla usually do not contain file extensions (not *.html, but something like /texts/123-good-article), serving static files with such URLs would be with mime type application/octet-stream. So instead of seeing a page in browser, a user would get a prompt to save the file. To avoid that, we can tune our server configuration: default_type "text/html; charset=utf-8"; or, if we can't configure the server, we might be able to use Cloudflare workers (when client-server requests go through Cloudflare):

// Worker to change the default Content-Type in response headers:
addEventListener('fetch', event => {
  // Call the function to set the Content-Type only for files without extensions:
  if (event.request.url.lastIndexOf('.') <= event.request.url.lastIndexOf('/'))
    event.respondWith(handleRequest(event.request))
})
 
/**
 * Respond to the request
 * @param {Request} request
 */
async function handleRequest(request) {
  let response = await fetch(request.url, request)
  // Act only if the Content-Type is 'application':
  if (response.headers.get('content-type') !== 'application/octet-stream')
    return response
 
  // Make the headers mutable by re-constructing the Response:
  response = new Response(response.body, response)
  response.headers.set("content-type", "text/html; charset=utf-8")
  return response
}