Download websites that use Sarka-SPIP

About Sarka-SPIP

Between a content management system and a finished website sits a layer where most of the visible decisions get made, and Sarka-SPIP lives in it. The system underneath is SPIP, a PHP publishing platform with its own template language. Sarka-SPIP is the skeleton on top: a base layout and template framework that a builder starts from instead of assembling page structure by hand.

A detection here is therefore a detection of two things at once, and the two are worth separating. Finding this framework means SPIP is running underneath, because the framework cannot exist without it. The reverse does not hold, since plenty of SPIP sites use a different skeleton or a hand-written one, so our figure describes a subset of the SPIP population rather than measuring it.

As of October 2026 we see Sarka-SPIP on 51 sites, spread across 13 distinct versions, with 4.2.0 appearing more often than any other in our data. Version spread that wide over a group that small is the signature of a long tail. Sites were built at different moments by different people, and each was frozen at whatever release happened to be current on the day the work was signed off. A framework dating from 2008 that still carries installs on this many separate versions is being maintained by nobody in particular, a site at a time, usually by whoever is still answering the phone at the agency that built it.

Which makes the population interesting to a specific kind of buyer. A site running a skeleton this old is a site whose owner has not migrated, and the reason is normally budget or inertia rather than attachment to the stack. Agencies selling replatforming work, security vendors interested in aging PHP deployments and researchers studying how institutional websites decay all want the same list. Detection is reasonably firm when it fires, because a template framework leaves structural marks in the markup, class names and generated asset paths, but a site that has customised its templates heavily can shed those marks and drop out of the count entirely. The software is GPL v3, which also means there is no vendor with a customer list to compare our figure against.

A per-domain lookup answers whether one site uses this skeleton. Whole-list access answers what an individual check never will: how large the surviving population actually is, which versions cluster with which hosting providers, whether these sites sit on shared hosting or their own infrastructure, and what a migration path off the stack looks like in aggregate. For something this niche the export is the only practical way to find the sites at all, because no search engine indexes template scaffolding.