title: Joomla to Static HTML website
body: <p>I have a Hindi magazine website hosted on Joomla. Though helpful from publishing point of view the site was a maintenance nightmare. Joomla is so much susceptible to hacker attacks. My host will often shut down my site due to bots attacking my website. Recently I relaunched the site as a new Wordpress based site on a different name. The Joomla based website would therefore never be updated anymore. However, I do want to maintain the old content. I have used PHP but hardly am a power user.</p>
  
  <p>I want to convert the files as plain HTML. I created a mirror of the website using HTTrack. But thanks to the fact that Joomla had variety of URLs for the same page (if you used a SEF URL plugin you would understand) the mirror is full of redundant content. Moreover I have repetitive HTML content (for header,footer,menu etc) in each page.</p>
  
  <p>My questions are:</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>Which is a better option, create a static HTML site or PHP4.x pages (with Unicode content and having include PHP fragments for repetitive content)?</li>
  <li>If latter is better should I use template system like Smarty? I am worried about caching since the content will hardly be updated I want caches to last forever.</li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>Thanks for the help.</p>