1 Topic by Kurt8

  • Kurt8
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Topic: Any way to export all posts to text file?

Hello,

I am using punBB (very successfully!) for discussion groups for some online courses I am teaching. Once the courses are finished, the students will no longer have access to the actual puBB forum. As the courses come to an end, my students are wanting a backup of ALL of the messages posted during the semester which they can archive and view after the course ends on their own computers. Is there any way I can easily export all threads and messages to a SINGLE text file (would be the best)? Or at least single files for each thread?

Thanks in advance.

Kurt

2 Reply by Kurt8

  • Kurt8
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Re: Any way to export all posts to text file?

Okay, I have been fooling around with this a little. I just tried printing an entire thread to PDF file using PDFCreator. That actually worked really well and the PDFs look nice. Since I don't have too many threads in my forums (the courses are quite small) this might work. Still wondering in any one has any other ideas?

Thanks.

Kurt

  • Smartys
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Re: Any way to export all posts to text file?

I think that would probably be the best way to go.

  • From: Leuven, Belgium
  • Registered: 2005-06-14
  • Posts: 2,653

Re: Any way to export all posts to text file?

A PDF is probably best indeed.

  • From: -8 GMT
  • Registered: 2004-05-04
  • Posts: 1,396

Re: Any way to export all posts to text file?

Link to said PDFCreator? This sounds interesting.

~James
FluxBB - Less is more

6 Reply by Kurt8 (edited by Kurt8 2008-03-15 23:10)

  • Kurt8
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Re: Any way to export all posts to text file?

Dr.Jeckyl wrote:

Link to said PDFCreator? This sounds interesting.

I use PDF Creator all the time. It adds a "PDF Printer" to any application and allows you to save any file type as a PDF document. Here's the link:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/

There are a few other ones out there but this one is free and works fine on my Windows XP machine.

You can even use it to save a single page of a multi-page PDF which sometimes comes in handy.

Kurt

  • From: -8 GMT
  • Registered: 2004-05-04
  • Posts: 1,396

Re: Any way to export all posts to text file?

That's pretty cool! Appears to save the print preview page as a pdf. This could come in handy.

~James
FluxBB - Less is more

8 Reply by pedrotuga (edited by pedrotuga 2008-03-16 23:07)

  • Registered: 2006-04-30
  • Posts: 382

Re: Any way to export all posts to text file?

Well... there is a printable topic mod out threre. It outputs cleaner pages and all the posts in the same page.

Then you can use for example wget to get all the ages to your local computer.

If I really needed to do this i think the ultimate solution is to write a script that outputs all the data in whatever format you want. But that requires some programming knowledge.

9 Reply by MattF

  • MattF
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Re: Any way to export all posts to text file?

If one fancied doing it with some code, you could quite easily adapt admin_prune.php to do the job. Rewrite it so that it dumps to file in a given format instead of deleting the threads, (or both).

MattF's Website

10 Reply by sirena

  • sirena
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Re: Any way to export all posts to text file?

Couldn't you also adapt the news generator plugin to do some of this job too? : http://punbb.org/downloads.php

"This plugin generates static markup based on topics in a specific forum... " - ie it turns a bunch of topic posts in a forum into a static HTML page. You can even shape the output with its templating system. Crank it through your various forums and bingo.