Why Wild Apricot website content import is archive-based
When you bring your Wild Apricot pages, blog posts, and forum threads into MapleGather, MapleGather never visits your Wild Apricot site directly. Instead, you capture a copy of your own site with a free tool called HTTrack and upload that copy. This page explains why, and what that trade-off means for what comes across.
The short version
Section titled “The short version”You run HTTrack against your own Wild Apricot site, upload the resulting archive, and MapleGather reads your pages, blog posts, and forum threads out of it. Page text, posts, and threads come across as editable drafts; things like gadget settings, member-only access rules, and site navigation don’t, because an archive only captures what a public visitor can see.
How it works
Section titled “How it works”HTTrack is a widely used website-copying tool that saves a snapshot of a site’s public pages to your computer, the same way a browser would render them. You run it yourself, against your own Wild Apricot site, and it produces a single archive file. When you upload that archive, MapleGather extracts it, detects the pages, blog posts, and forum threads inside it, and lets you review each one before anything is created.
Because the archive is a snapshot of rendered pages rather than Wild Apricot’s own data, it captures what’s publicly visible — text, images, and structure — but not the underlying configuration behind it. That’s why imported content is described as lossy by design: it’s the best faithful copy of what a visitor could see, not a perfect replica of your Wild Apricot setup.
Why it works this way
Section titled “Why it works this way”MapleGather doesn’t have an automated, ongoing way to sign in to your Wild Apricot site and crawl it directly — doing that would mean storing and using your Wild Apricot credentials against pages you haven’t asked it to touch, on a schedule you don’t control. Using an archive you capture yourself means you’re always in control of exactly what gets read, and nothing happens on Wild Apricot’s side that you didn’t initiate.
Edge cases & boundaries
Section titled “Edge cases & boundaries”- Gadget configurations, member-only access rules, and your site’s navigation menus don’t survive the archive — you’ll rebuild these directly in MapleGather.
- Layout can differ from your original site — inline styles, gadgets, and multi-column layouts don’t always survive an archive copy cleanly. You can edit any imported page after it comes in.
- Broken image references in the archive (images that weren’t captured) are called out per page so you can choose to skip just the images or the whole page.
- A blog post’s original author is preserved as text even when MapleGather can’t match them to a member automatically — you can link the author to a member afterward.