FunnelWeb

Crawling - HTML to import

Funnelweb imports HTML either from a live website, from a folder on disk, or a folder on disk with HTML which was retrieved from a live website and may still have absolute links refering to that website.

Funnelweb can only import things it can crawl, i.e. content that is linked from HTML. If your site contains javascript links or password protected content, then you may have to perform some extra steps to get funnelweb to crawl your content.

To crawl a live website, supply the crawler with a base HTTP URL to start crawling from. This URL must be the URL which all the other URLs you want from the site start with.

For example

$> bin/funnelweb --crawler:url=http://www.whitehouse.gov --crawler:maxsize=50  --ploneupload=http://admin:admin@localhost:8080/Plone

will restrict the crawler to the first 50 pages and then convert the content into a local Plone site.

The site you crawl will be cached locally, so if you run funnelweb again it will run much quicker. If you'd like to disable the local caching use

$> bin/funnelweb --cache:output=

If you'd like to reset the cache, refreshing it's data, set the crawlers cache to nothing

$> bin/funnelweb --crawler:cache=

By default the cache is stored in var/funnelwebcache/{site url}/. You can set this to another directory using:

$> bin/funnelweb --cache:output=my_new_dir

You can also crawl a local directory of HTML with relative links by just using a file:// style URL

$> bin/funnelweb --crawler:url=file:///mydirectory

or if the local directory contains HTML saved from a website and might have absolute URLs in it, the you can set this as the cache. The crawler will always look up the cache first

$> bin/funnelweb --crawler:url=http://therealsite.com --crawler:cache=mydirectory

The following will not crawl anything larger than 4Mb

$> bin/funnelweb --crawler:max=400000

To skip crawling links by regular expression

[funnelweb]
recipe = funnelweb
crawler-url=http://www.whitehouse.gov
crawler-ignore = \.mp3
                 \.mp4

If funnelweb is having trouble parsing the HTML of some pages, you can preprocesses the HTML before it is parsed. e.g.

[funnelweb]
recipe = funnelweb
crawler-patterns = (<script>)[^<]*(</script>)
crawler-subs = \1\2

If you'd like to skip processing links with certain mimetypes you can use the drop:condition option. This TALES expression determines what will be processed further

[funnelweb]
recipe = funnelweb
drop-condition: python:item.get('_mimetype') not in ['application/x-javascript','text/css','text/plain','application/x-java-byte-code'] and item.get('_path','').split('.')[-1] not in ['class']

Templates

Funnelweb has a built-in clustering algorithm that tries to automatically extract the content from the HTML template. This is slow and not always effective. Often you will need to input your own template extraction rules.

If you'd like to turn off the automatic templates

$> bin/funnelweb --templateauto:condition=python:False

Rules are in the form of

(title|description|text|anything) = (text|html|optional) XPath

For example

[funnelweb]
recipe = funnelweb
crawler-site_url=http://www.whitehouse.gov
ploneupload-target=http://admin:admin@localhost:8080/Plone
template1-title       = text //div[@class='body']//h1[1]
template1-_delete1    = optional //div[@class='body']//a[@class='headerlink']
template1-_delete2    = optional //div[contains(@class,'admonition-description')]
template1-description = text //div[contains(@class,'admonition-description')]//p[@class='last']
template1-text        = html //div[@class='body']

Note that for a single template e.g. template1, ALL of the XPaths need to match otherwise that template will be skipped and the next template tried. If you'd like to make it so that a single XPath isn't nessary for the template to match then use the keyword optional or optionaltext instead of text or html before the XPath.

In the default pipeline there are four templates called template1, template2, template3 and template4.

When an XPath is applied within a single template, the HTML it matches will be removed from the page. Another rule in that same template can't match the same HTML fragment.

If a content part is not useful to Plone (e.g. redundant text, title or description) it is a way to effectively remove that HTML from the content.

To help debug your template rules you can set debug mode

$> bin/funnelweb --template1:debug --template2:debug

Setting debug mode on templateauto will give you details about the rules it uses.

$> bin/funnelweb --templateauto:debug
...
DEBUG:templateauto:'icft.html' discovered rules by clustering on 'http://...'
Rules:
      text= html //div[@id = "dal_content"]//div[@class = "content"]//p
      title= text //div[@id = "dal_content"]//div[@class = "content"]//h3
Text:
      TITLE: ...
      MAIN-10: ...
      MAIN-10: ...
      MAIN-10: ...

For more information about XPath see

• http://www.w3schools.com/xpath/default.asp
• http://blog.browsermob.com/2009/04/test-your-selenium-xpath-easily-with-firebug/

Site Analysis

In order to provide a cleaner-looking Plone site, there are several options to analyse the entire crawled site and clean it up. These are turned off by default.

To determine if an item is a default page for a container (it has many links to items in that container, even if not contained in that folder), and then move it to that folder, use

$> bin/funnelweb --indexguess:condition=python:True

You can automatically find better page titles by analysing backlink text

[funnelweb]
recipe = funnelweb
titleguess-condition = python:True
titleguess-ignore =
      click
      read more
      close
      Close
      http:
      https:
      file:
      img

The following will find items only referenced by one page and move them into a new folder with the page as the default view.

$> bin/funnelweb --attachmentguess:condition=python:True

or the following will only move attachments that are images and use index-html as the new name for the default page of the newly created folder

[funnelweb]
recipe = funnelweb
attachmentguess-condition = python: subitem.get('_type') in ['Image']
attachmentguess-defaultpage = index-html

The following will tidy up the URLs based on a TALES expression

$> bin/funnelweb --urltidy:link_expr="python:item['_path'].endswith('.html') and item['_path'][:-5] or item['_path']"

If you'd like to move content around before it's uploaded you can use the urltidy step as well e.g.

$> bin/funnelweb --urltidy:link_expr=python:item['_path'].startswith('/news') and '/otn/news'+item['path'][5:] or item['_path']

If you want to hide content from navigation you can use hideguess

$> bin/funnelweb --hideguess:condition=python:item['path']=='musthide'

Plone Uploading

Uploading happens via remote XML-RPC calls so can be done to a live running site anywhere.

To set where a the site will be uploaded to use

$> bin/funnelweb --ploneupload:target=http://username:password@myhost.com/myfolder

Currently only basic authentication via setting the username and password in the url is supported. If no target is set then the site will be crawled but not uploaded.

If you'd like to change the type of what's uploaded

$> bin/funnelweb --changetype:value=python:{'Folder':'HelpCenterReferenceManualSection','Document':HelpCenterLeafPage}.get(item['_type'],item['_type'])

This will set a new value for the type of the item. You could make this conditional e.g

$> bin/funnelweb --changetype:condition=python:item['_path].startswith('/news')

or by using a more complex expression for the new type

$> bin/funnelweb --changetype:value=python:item['_path'].startswith('/news') and 'NewNewsType' or item['_type]

By default, funnelweb will automatically create Plone aliases based on the original crawled URLs, so that any old links will automatically be redirected to the new cleaned-up urls. You can disable this by

$> bin/funnelweb --plonealias:target=

You can change what items get published to which state by setting the following

[funnelweb]
recipe = funnelweb
publish-value = python:["publish"]
publish-condition = python:item.get('_type') != 'Image' and not options.get('disabled')

Funnelweb will hide certain items from Plone's navigation if that item was only ever linked to from within the content area. You can disable this behavior by

$> bin/funnelweb --plonehide:target=

You can get a local file representation of what will be uploaded by using the following

$> bin/funnelweb --localupload:output=var/mylocaldir

Using external blueprints

If you have decided you need to customise your pipeline and you want to install transformation steps that use blueprints not already included in funnelweb or transmogrifier, you can include them using the eggs option in a funnelweb buildout part

[funnelweb]
recipe = funnelweb
eggs = myblueprintpackage
pipeline = mypipeline.cfg

However, this only works if your blueprint package includes the following setuptools entrypoint in its setup.py

entry_points="""
      [z3c.autoinclude.plugin]
      target = transmogrify
      """,
      )

Attributes available in funnelweb pipeline

When using the default blueprints in funnelweb the following are some of the attributes that will become attached to the items that each blueprint has access to. These can be used in the various condition statements etc. as well as your own blueprints.

_site_url

The base of the url as passed into the webcrawler

_path

The remainder of the URL. _site_url + _path = URL

_mimetype

The mimetype as returned by the crawler

_content

The content of the item crawled, include image, file or HTML data.

_orig_path

The original path of the item that was crawled. This is useful for setting redirects so you don't get 404 errors after migrating content.

_sort_order

An integer representing the order in which this item was crawled. Helps to determine what order items should be sorted in folders created on the server if your site has navigation which has links ordered top to bottom.

_type

The type of object to be created as returned by the "typeguess" step

title, description, text, etc.

The template steps will typically create fields with content in them taken from _content

_template

The template steps will leave the HTML that wasn't seperated out into different fields in this attribute.

_defaultpage

Set on an Folder item where you want to tell the uploading steps to set the containing item mentioned in _defaultpage to be the default page shown on that folder instead of a content listing.

_transitions

Specify the workflow action you'd like to make on an item after it's uploaded or updated.

_origin

This is used internally with the transmogrify.siteanalysis.relinker blueprint as a way to tell it that you have changed the _path and you now want the relinker to find any links that refer to _origin to now point to _path.

The Funnelweb Pipeline

see http://github.com/collective/funnelweb/blob/master/funnelweb/remote.cfg or type

$> bin/funnelweb --pipeline