Our local dev environment allows us to run a CMS like Craft but our (government) host is static only. We currently accomplish things with movable type 4, but would like something more modern. MT 7 costs $1000 a year, so that is right out.
Is there a plug-in for Craft that can export static html we can upload to our host?
Perhaps you could have a local/internal Craft install and then regularly run a script that crawls the site and saves all the pages as static HTML. Tools like HTTrack already do a pretty good job of this.
Or there are static cache plugins like Blitz that you might be able to utilise. They’re designed for caching, but if you warm the cache you might be able to export the static files for uploading to your host.
UPDATE: Blitz 3 makes this possible. Read the announcement at: https://putyourlightson.com/articles/blitz-3-embracing-the-jamstack
I don’t have direct experience doing this yet, but I have a future project in mind so have been doing some research and tinkering. There are a few options I’m aware of and JAMstack does look like where the puck is headed.
What you are probably looking for is the CraftQL plugin and something like GatsbyJS, there is an episode of the DevMode podcast that goes into detail about how something like this is architected.
Statamic is another option to look at, the unreleased v3 will have an abstracted data layer to let you hook it up to Craft, (also discussed on DevMode). If those don’t suite your needs there are many more static generators All you need is one that can consume an abstracted data layer, either a GrapQL endpoint or a REST endpoint, which you can create using the free first party element api plugin.
The plan will be to use a static cache plugin. The options we're evaluating are Blitz, Craft Static, and HTML Cache, all available from the Craft CMS plugin store.