Tuesday, June 24, 2008  

A new module was released today that allows site administrators to easily export the content from their site for archival and/or off-line browsing purposes. Until now, EditMe has provided a MySQL/Zip backup for download from sites on a Professional or better plan. That mechanism is considered a premium service because of the need to essentially store a second copy of the site on our servers. For browsable backups of the site, we've pointed users to HTTrack, an open source application designed to create off-line copies of web sites. The power and complexity of HTTrack can be daunting, and so many customers have requested something simpler. We're glad to finally heed that request.

The Site Export module adds three scripts to your EditMe site. Each provides a method to pull content out of your site.

Export HTML

Export HTML creates a single browsable HTML page that lists every content page in your site complete with linked attachments and comments. A table of contents at the top provides navigation, and content links are modified to point to the various pages within the document. This is the best way to export a browsable copy of an EditMe site. Simply view this page and choose File->Save As in your browser.

Export XML

Export XML creates an XML representation of the entire site. It includes page content, attachments, comments, users and groups. This format is useful for programmatic extraction of content from your site.

Export Attachments

Export Attachments provides a simple list of links to all attachments on the site. This can be used with any download tool to pull down copies of all attachments from a site. EditMe recommends the FireFox plugin DownloadThemAll for use with this report. 

To install the Site Export module, log into your site as an Administrator, go to Site Settings, and select Modules from the Site Management menu.