Hi! One of my clients asked me the possibility to have his web site on CD for marketing purposes (is an on-line magazine). I know several off-line browsers, but the website becames static. Have you already done this? Any recommendation? Any clue is very welcome.

Apache / MySQL / PHP need to have the engines running from the OS in the background. Unless those components are running, you will not get any parsed output from your scripts.

I suppose you could execute files from a CD/DVD drive if you changed the configuration for that drive to be the root, but I would think it would be very slow, even if runned locally. Also doing this would prevent you having any kind file writing which would limit you quite a bit.

If your website only contains HTML pages you could use a program called ShellRun (found here).

I did something very similar recently... I created a CD which autoplays my HTML page which contained a bunch of links to different PDF documentation... It works great!

If your site is PHP/MYSQL driven you could go to each page and save the generated HTML code and then put it on the CD... The shellRun program will load the index.html page and it will look like a regular website from their.

Keep in mind that all the links will have to have relative urls and you will have to make sure that the hiarchy is there in the folders... If the user clicks on a link which will call for a page that will load a mysql query or a .php file it will not work. The program is very versitile in what types of pages it will open but PHP isn't of them.

Check it out, it may be what your looking for.

Rosco,

OutSite-In (http://www.outsite-in.com) is a software that helps you get easily your website off-line and still dynamic even on CD.
We call the offline site an "outersite". An outersite manages automatically your PHP and MySQL database on Windows without end-user installation.

You can try it for free.

Greetings!

Claudia - OutSite-In Team

I asked this question years ago when PHP was just reaching headlines, not because I was after this but because I wanted to work on a solution for this. The answers I got back was negative, even though I told them how I planned on doing such a thing. It got so negative and so one-sided that I gave up doing it and I do regret it as I've found the only solutions available now require you to pay for it, fair enough and they've also gone further with doing it for a myriad of languages as well as databases.

So the answer is, it's possible, but I only know of paid solutions, if anyone knows of an open source solution, then that would be good to know.

Cheers,

MC