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Moodle Forum export XML to HTML XSLT convertor
Last Updated: 17/Jun/2008
Author: Dean Stringer (deans@waikato.ac.nz)
Copyright (C) 2008  University of Waikato			

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License
as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2
of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA  
02110-1301, USA.
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Description:

Contained in the archive this file is distributed with is an XSLT file 
which can be used to convert a Moodle forum archive XML file into a 
human readable HTML page. The rendered page is portable and contains 
the discussions and posts in their original structure but without the 
original Moodle theme and header/footer. It also uses some JavaScript 
which lets the reader expand/collapse the discussions.


Usage:

You will need access to an XSLT engine of some sort to use this 
conversion tool. Any generic XSLT processor should do as there are no 
special or custom functions used in the XSLT file delivered. 

If you're happy using the command line and are on an Windows desktop 
the you might consider downloading the MSXSL tool from Microsoft, or 
Michael Kay's SAXON engine, both of which you would run from a DOS 
window. If on a *nix machine there is a good chance you will have 
access to something like xsltproc (LibXSLT) or sabcmd (Sablotron) and 
if not your administrator might install them for you.

Here's how you would process a Moodle export using MSXSL:

  Start-Run-'CMD' + <Enter>
  CD to the folder you saved your moodle.xml file to
  C:\Tools\MS_XSL\msxsl.exe moodle.xml moodle.xslt > output.html

Open up temp.html and you should see you rendered forum archive.


Configuration:

Rendered versions of the forum archives include links to some 
dependency icons, css and JavaScript files. You may want to move these 
somewhere other than where the rendered HTML page goes so you don't 
have multiple copies of them to manage. To do this you need to tweak 
the following three lines near the top of moodle.xsl:

  <xsl:variable name="pathImg" select="'./'"></xsl:variable>
  <xsl:variable name="pathCss" select="'./'"></xsl:variable>
  <xsl:variable name="pathJs" select="'./'"></xsl:variable>

As you can see their paths are set in the "select" attribute to the 
value './' which tells the browser to look in the same folder as the 
HTML page itself. You may want to change them to something like 
"http://www.mysite.edu/myfolder/" for example.


Performance issues:

The XML files generated by exporting forum discussions can be very 
large if there are a good number of posts. Although it is possible to 
use the XSLT for on-the-fly rendering of the archive using PHP you 
should test the impact this may have on your server, and possibly use 
it only on a non-production server if you expect to be performing a 
lot of conversions. Much better to transform off line in batch mode 
somehow, possibly from the command-line.


Date handling:

Moodle stores datestamp/time data in fields within Moodle itself and 
in the export files in the format that is output by the PHP time 
function, ie the current time measured in the number of seconds since 
the UNIX Epoch  (January 1 1970 00:00:00 GMT). These are large 
integers and not human readable or useful for display

One possible means of rendering these is to use a XSLT extension 
functions. This means that you must be able to register the function 
in your development environment before calling this XSLT transform.