An Inter­net Archive Plu­g­in for Craft CMS 5

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Now that the Webmention plugin is finally Craft 5 compatible after last week's update, I jumped at the chance and updated another plugin I had once written for my personal site.

The Internet Archive plugin automates the archiving of your posts to the Wayback Machine. Each time you publish or update a post, the plugin submits the URL to the Internet Archive, so that a new snapshot is saved. It’s a great way to preserve your posts for the – hopefully unlikely – event that your personal website is going offline one day, but it also creates a historical archive of your content, allowing you to look up past versions of your pages.

Additionally, you can send all public URLs of your site to the Internet Archive at the touch of just one button in the Control Panel. The plugin will add all the URLs to Craft’s jobs queue and, one by one, send them over to the archive.

There are still a lot of features that would certainly be nice to add in the future: keeping a record of the entries and URLs that already have been sent to the Internet Archive, for example. Or sending the URLs of all the links within a post to the Internet Archive as well to prevent link rot – potentially even checking whether the original page is still available and replacing dead links on-the-fly with their archived Wayback Machine versions, similar to or maybe even using Remy Sharp’s ingenious unrot∙link. For pages with content that changes quite often, scheduled snapshots, for example on a weekly or monthly basis, could be useful. As could be a way to select which entry types and sections should be archived.

But for now, the plugin does the most important thing: it ensures your posts are archived by the Internet Archive. Plain and simple.

If you want to try it out yourself, you can install the plugin via Composer. Go to your Craft project in your terminal of choice and tell Composer to load the plugin:

composer require matthiasott/craft-internetarchive

In the Control Panel, go to Settings → Plugins and click the “Install” button for the Internet Archive plugin.

I’ll also submit the plugin to Craft’s Plugin Store soon.

Let me know how you like it. And in case you have any bugs, feature request, or other feedback to share, head over to the GitHub repository and file an issue. Or let me know via Mastodon, Bluesky, email, or Webmention.

Happy archiving! 🏛️🤘

~

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