# Static Publisher Overview

Static Publisher is a WordPress-to-AWS publishing system split into two parts: a WordPress plugin admin and an external Node.js exporter. The plugin handles configuration, queue state, diagnostics, and log visibility inside WordPress. The exporter, published as `@smart-cloud/publisher-exporter`, performs crawl, URL rewriting, deployment to S3, and CloudFront invalidation on a machine that has Node.js, Playwright, and deployment credentials.

The split is intentional. The plugin does not execute shell commands from PHP. Instead, it writes runtime JSON files under `wp-content/uploads/smartcloud-static-publisher/runtime`, and an external runner processes queued jobs from those files. This makes the model safer and more predictable for production WordPress environments.

Static Publisher fits teams that want WordPress to remain the editorial control plane while the public site is delivered statically from AWS. It also supports deployment profiles, so one crawl artifact can be promoted to multiple targets such as staging and production.