My wife had a WordPress blog back in the blog heyday that was reasonably popular. I hosted it on a VPS and after she stopped updating it a few years ago I disabled everything interactive about it and pretty much have let it be.
Years later I’m trying to clean out tech debt in my life and I’d like to preserve her writings there for posterity; there’s a lot about our children (anonymously at the time) that they will likely enjoy reading in future years.
The site is still up and running on WordPress 2.2.1. Please don’t yell at me about security vulnerabilities and my irresponsibility; I’m well aware.
It looks like all my options for turning the blog into static HTML or a print book will require upgrading the site to an at least somewhat more current version of WordPress so I can use more current plugins, which I’m concerned will be painful; I’d really like to minimize the time needed here. Are there any options I’m missing?
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Does the old version of WP have an export function? If so, try exporting everything and importing to a recent version.
Failing that, see if you can use phpmyadmin to dump the wp_posts table to a .csv file. Then load that into an Excel or LibreOffice Calculator sheet. You’ll have a column with the html for a post / page.
The best thing in my opinion is to keep a backup of the database + files, if you want to keep it functional as it is maybe use [archive.org](http://archive.org) to save a copy of the site, or using something like [https://www.httrack.com/](https://www.httrack.com/) to generate an HTML version of the site and even browsing it offline.
If you want to keep it online, yes ideally you will need to secure it somehow.
I will do it this way :
* Create a backup of the whole site and install it into a subdomain.
* Remove all non essential extensions
* Validate if the theme is still supported
* update wordpress (all errors will start to pop-up)
* maybe update PHP, memory or other settings on the server if the new version asks for it
* if the theme is no longer compatible you might need to transfer to Twenty Twenty four, but I recommend to install classic editor extension to avoid any conflict with Gutemberg
* Install Wordfence or WPShield to secure it
if everything works, you can move this version back to the root, keeping the original as a backup.
Good luck!
I’d second archive.org. It may already have a a copy of the site.
You’re overthinking this. Create a staging website, update it. Push it live