A snapshot is a static rendering of a MemoWiki topic which allows its content be be viewed without using the MemoWiki server or software. In the snapshot of a topic, the links to pages, references, data items, and files all work as in the ‘live’ topic, but there are no actions possible (the usual buttons are replaced with a single Home link).

Use Build static snapshot on the more... page to create the snapshot (this can be a slow process as all the pages in the topic have to be created from their source).

Once a snapshot has been built successfully, you can browse it immediately from the confirmation page, or you can browse it from the more... page. Future builds (updates) of the snapshot will generally only need to build the files whose source has changed. There is also then an option on the more... page to delete the snapshot (erase all its .html files).

A snapshot can also be published to a web server if you are authorized to do so, and in this case the Build Snapshot page will also provide a link to a check page if one was specified in the Topic Settings.

Private pages

Pages with a name which starts with ‘*’ are considered private and will not be added to the snapshot.

Private headers and footers

By default, MemoWiki will provide a standard header and footer for each snapshot page. If you select Use private snapshot header and footer as a Topic setting, then MemoWiki will use the pages ‘*snap-header’ and ‘*snap-footer’ as the header and footer for each snapshot page (if they exist – it is not required that there be a header or footer). These pages may contain Wiki markup as usual, but will normally also contain HTML markup (the head matter, title, etc.).

When a private header is used it completely replaces the default header provided by MemoWiki, including styles used for hanging paragraphs, etc. Therefore the header will usually include (or link to) some or all the content of the MemoWiki style sheet; see Style Sheets for details.

The header and footer can be customized as each snapshot page is built using any of the following special entities:

Entity	Description
&%topic;	The topic to which this page belongs
&%page;	The name of the page
&%year;	The year the page was last edited [yyyy]
&%date;	The date the page was last edited [yyyy-mm-dd]
&%time;	The time the page was last edited [hh:mm]
&%editor;	The user who last edited the page
&%mwversion;	The MemoWiki version number [n.nn]
&%mwdate;	The MemoWiki version date [yyyy-mm-dd]
&%nowyear;	The year the snapshot was built [yyyy]
&%nowdate;	The date the snapshot was built [yyyy-mm-dd]
&%nowtime;	The time the snapshot was built [hh:mm]

The snapshot index page

On entering a web site or page, most web servers connect the user (client browser) to the page named ‘index’ (note that this name must be all lower-case on many servers). This means that if you wish, you can set up a different ‘entry point’ to the static snapshot than is used for the MemoWiki topic, by having a distinct index page (MemoWiki will ensure this name is lowercase, so you can call it ‘Index’ if you like).

If you do not supply an index page then the Build static snapshot action will create one for you, using a copy of a specific page (set in the Topic Settings). If no specific page was set, a copy of the topic home page is used. In either case the copy is named ‘index’.

Internals

The snapshot files are all placed in the top directory of the topic (they have to be in that directory as otherwise they would not be able to make safe relative links to the topic’s files). The files associated with a topic are often large and so are not duplicated, so this is just a snapshot of the editable files (wiki files, references, and data items).

To ‘publish’ a MemoWiki topic, all that is needed are the .html files at the top level of a topic and the content of the files directory. The other directories and files are not referred to from the snapshot .html files, so need not be included. MemoWiki can publish the snapshot to most web servers, as described here.

The snapshot can either be served as static pages and files from a web server, or it can be browsed directly on a hard disk (no server is needed for this).