Elbutschitos HTML Publisher

Elbutschitos HTML Publisher generates a fully static HTML export of your WordPress posts and pages, using WordPress purely as a headless content source, and pushes the result to a deployment target of your choice: Netlify or any standard SFTP host.

Full tutorial: htmlpublisher.ub-internetberatung.de — step-by-step setup, template markers, navigation, forms, URL rewriting, HTML cleanup rules, and troubleshooting.

Core features

• Template-driven generation – use your own HTML template with simple ###placeholder### markers (title, content, date, author, and any custom field via a flexible field-mapping syntax). Assign a different template per post or page when needed.
• Two deployment targets – upload over SFTP (password or private key authentication) to any web host, or deploy straight to Netlify via its API. Batch transfer with progress feedback, or push a single page at a time from the post editor.
• Automatic URL rewriting – internal links and media URLs are automatically rewritten to root-relative paths, with additional custom find-and-replace rules available for anything else (old domains, CDN paths, and so on).
• Working contact forms on a static site – forms keep working after export. On Netlify, forms are automatically wired up for Netlify Forms. On SFTP targets, a small bundled PHP handler emails submissions, with spam-honeypot protection and lightweight client-side validation (required fields, email format) that needs no configuration for accessibility-friendly form markup.
• Navigation from a WordPress menu – keep your designer’s existing, fully styled navigation markup and let the plugin fill it with the real menu structure from a WordPress menu (multi-level menus supported), instead of maintaining two separate navigations by hand.
• Markdown export – export all content as plain .md files with YAML front matter, optionally bundling and localizing referenced images, for use with static-site generators such as Hugo, Jekyll, or Eleventy, or for archiving in a note-taking tool.
• HTML cleanup rules – remove WordPress-only CSS classes, or rename specific layout-relevant ones to your own class names via the class mapping tool so you can restyle them yourself; strip or change arbitrary attributes via simple selector-based rules, and inject custom per-post data into the template.

Elbutschitos HTML Publisher is aimed at agencies and developers who want the editorial convenience of WordPress combined with the speed, security, and low hosting cost of a static site.

Bundled libraries

This plugin bundles the following third-party, MIT-licensed libraries so that no separate composer install step is required:

• phpseclib (3.x) – SFTP support
• paragonie/constant_time_encoding – runtime dependency of phpseclib
• league/html-to-markdown – Markdown export
• simplehtmldom – HTML parsing/manipulation used throughout the generator

All are MIT-licensed and compatible with this plugin’s GPLv2-or-later license. See the LICENSE.txt file for the full plugin license text and the vendor/ subfolders for each library’s own license.

External services

This plugin only contacts external services that you explicitly configure and trigger yourself:

• Netlify – if you configure a Netlify site and click “Deploy” (or “Test connection”), the plugin sends your generated site files (and, for the connection test, a simple API request) to the Netlify API (https://api.netlify.com), authenticated with the access token you provide. This happens only when you actively trigger a deploy or connection test – never automatically or in the background. Terms of Service, Privacy Policy.
• Your own SFTP host – if you configure an SFTP target, the plugin connects to the host you specify to upload files, using the credentials you provide. This is a server of your own choosing, not a service operated by this plugin’s author.

No data is sent anywhere without an explicit action from you, and no usage tracking or analytics of any kind is built into this plugin.