Export Joomla to Markdown

Export Joomla to Markdown
- Preparing for Use
- Modes of Operation
- Commands
  - Articles
  - Auto
    - Init
    - Edit
    - Export
  - Categories
  - Clear
  - Export
  - Statistics
  - Getting Help Or Making Changes

The Joomla! to Markdown (j2md) module is a node.js command line utility for converting Joomla 3 article content into markdown files. I needed to migrate an old Joomla 3 site to another platform and wrote this module to handle the heavy lifting for me. I wanted to use something like Jekyll or Eleventy for my site and knew that both supported markdown files.

npm Package:: https://www.npmjs.com/package/joomla-to-markdown

Note: This module was only tested against data from a Joomla 3 site running on MySQL; it could very well work with a Joomla 4 site, I just haven't tested it.

To use this module, first install it using the following command:

npm install joomla-to-markdown -g

Note: To use the module without installing it locally, use the following command instead:

npx j2md command [parameters]

Using the supported commands listed in the following section.

Preparing for Use

To use the module, you must complete the following steps to export your Joomla data and convert your article content to Markdown format:

Using MySQL Admin (shown below) or your export tool of choice export your site's categories table in JSON format to a local file.
Export your site's content table in JSON format to a local file.
Craft a template file (instructions below) that describes the format of the exported markdown file for each Joomla article.
Execute the module's export command to convert the contents of the JSON files to individual markdown files for each article.

The module uses both the Joomla site's categories and content table content because the article table only contains references to Category names via is category ID. The module must have access to the categories table in order to copy over the category name and category alias values when exporting articles.

Modes of Operation

This module originally shipped with an export process that required users to provide multiple command-line parameters every time they wanted to generate articles. Recognizing that as a user tweaks the export template, they may execute the process many times with the same parameters. To simplify the process for this use case, I added an auto command that enables users to drive article export through a configuration file.

Currently, the module only supports a default configuration file name (j2md.json) but I can easily update the module to accept the config file name as an input parameter.

Commands

The following sections illustrate how to use to use each of the commands provided by the module.

Articles

Use arts or a for this command.

Display a list of article information to the console; the module reads the content export file, parses the content then displays each Article Id, Article Title, and Alias in a table. Use this command to validate the contents of the content export.

j2md arts sourceFolder joomlaDatabasePrefix

For example, with all of the Joomla exported content in a folder called input and a database prefix of e3yh9, you would use the following command:

j2md arts input e3yh9

Note: if you don't have the exported Joomla content in a sub-folder, simply use . for the sourceFolder parameter.

The module will read the e3yh9_content.json file and display details for each article in a table as shown below:

 
Database: jmw_cms
Table: e3yh9_content

515 articles

 Id  Title                                                    Alias                                                                  
 ─── ──────────────────────────────────────────────────────── ───────────────────────
 1   Broken Display & 507 Error                               brokenscreen 
 3   About                                                    about
 4   Lotus Notes Local Encryption Gotcha                      localencryption
 6   Interesting BES 5.0 Upgrade  Fact                        bes50upgrade
 7   Debugging BlackBerry Applications on Vista 64-Bit        bbonvista64
 8   DeviceInfo.isInHolster()                                 isinholster
 9   Joomla is Amazing!                                       joomlaisamazing
 10  Grammar Checking Source Files?                           grammar
 .
 .
 .                          
 555 Site Upgrade Coming                                      site-upgrade-coming
------------------------------------------------------------- -----------------------

Auto

Reduces the amount of command-line parameters a user must provide to use the export process, replaces the required command-line parameters with a configuration file.

Init

Use auto init or ai for this command.

Create an empty configuration file in the current folder.

j2md auto init

When the command executes, it creates a file called j2md.json in the current folder with the following contents:

{
    "databasePrefix": "",
    "inputFolder": "",
    "outputFolder": "",
    "templateFileName": "",
    "gmtOffset": 0
}

Use a text editor to populate the file with the appropriate parameters for your project as shown below:

{
    "databasePrefix": "e3yh9",
    "inputFolder": "input",
    "outputFolder": "output",
    "templateFileName": "jekyll.md",
    "gmtOffset": -5
}

Note: You can open the file in the system's default editor from the command-line using the auto edit command in the same folder.

Edit

Use auto edit or aed for this command.

Launches the configuration file in the system's default editor.

j2md auto edit

Export

Use auto export or ae for this command.

Exports article content using the settings defined in the current folder's j2md.json configuration file. Use the auto init command to generate the file.

Clear

Use clear or x for this command.

Empties (clears) the contents of the output folder where the module writes article markdown files. Use this command to delete all of the exported article files as you try out different template versions or files.

Warning The clear command deletes all of the files in the specified folder, so use this command carefully.

Note: The module automatically overwrites existing files in the output folder, so there's really no need to ever use this command :-)

j2md clear outputFolder

For example, with all of the exported article markdown files in a folder called output, you would use the following command:

j2md clear output

Export

Use export or e for this command.

Flags:

--debug or -d: Sends additional content to the console as the module runs
--yearOnly -y: Added to support Eleventy when exporting using a template file. Uses only the year (instead of the full date) in the file name and removes the timestamp from the front matter.

When you've exported your Joomla site's content and you're ready to create markdown files start by creating a template file the module will use to format the exported markdown files. Since I knew I wanted to run this site on Jekyll (before migrating it to Eleventy), I grabbed the default first post from a new Jekyll site and modified it to use as a template for this module. A portion of the sample post is shown below.

---
layout: post
title:  "Welcome to Jekyll!"
date:   2022-11-18 15:29:16 -0500
categories: jekyll update
---
You’ll find this post in your `_posts` directory. Go ahead and edit it and re-build the site to see your changes. You can rebuild the site in many different ways, but the most common way is to run `jekyll serve`, which launches a web server and auto-regenerates your site when a file is updated.

...

Remove the body content from the file (the content below the second --- in the file) and update the YAML content at the top of the file. Use double curly braces around any Joomla content table fields you want inserted in the article file when generated.

In the example below, I used the table's title field for the article Title, created field for the article date, and introtext is the field name for the article's main content.

---
layout: post
title:  {{title}}
date:   {{created}}
categories: {{category_title}}
---
{{introtext}}

The export process adds two additional fields to the article record that you can use in your template:

category_title: The categories table category name for the selected article.
category_alias: The categories table alias for the selected article.

In the example above, category_title is used to set the Jekyll post category.

Now, with the template file in place, you're ready to export your Joomla articles to markdown files. In a terminal window, execute the following command

j2md export sourceFolder joomlaDatabasePrefix destinationFolder templateFile

For example, with the following configuration:

The Joomla exported content JSON files in a folder called input
The Joomla site's database prefix e3yh9
Output folder output
Template file name jekyll.md

Use the following command:

j2md export input e3yh9 output jekyll.md

The module will create a separate markdown file for each article defined in the exported content table; an example of a generated file looks like this:

---
layout: post
title:  Site Upgrade Coming
date:   2022-11-18 15:29:16
categories: Miscellaneous
---
This site runs on Joomla, since, I think, the Joomla 1.x days. The Joomla team recently released Joomla 4 and they're getting ready to shut down support for Joomla 3. In preparation for this, I removed the site map menu and upgraded the SEO engine.

I haven't used attachments in this site in a long time, so I will soon delete the attachments plugin and update all articles that had attachments (10 articles). I'll put a notice on the top of each affected page and, if the attachment is still relevant, store it somewhere else and provide a link to the file's new location.

The sample post Jekyll creates for a new site has a GMT offset added to the create date field. To add this to exported markdown files, add a GMT offset to the export command as shown in the follwing example:

j2md export input e3yh9 output jekyll.md -5

This will add -0500 to the date field as shown in the following example markdown file:

---
layout: post
title:  Site Upgrade Coming
date:   2022-11-18 15:29:16 -0500
categories: Miscellaneous
---
This site runs on Joomla, since, I think, the Joomla 1.x days. The Joomla team recently released Joomla 4 and they're getting ready to shut down support for Joomla 3. In preparation for this, I removed the site map menu and upgraded the SEO engine.

I haven't used attachments in this site in a long time, so I will soon delete the attachments plugin and update all articles that had attachments (10 articles). I'll put a notice on the top of each affected page and, if the attachment is still relevant, store it somewhere else and provide a link to the file's new location.

Statistics

Use stats or s for this command.

Displays category count and article count for the specified Joomla exported content. Use this command to determine how many categories and articles are listed in the exported Joomla tables.

j2md cats sourceFolder joomlaDatabasePrefix

For example, with all of the Joomla exported content in a folder called input and a database prefix of e3yh9, you would use the following command:

j2md stats input e3yh9

The module will read the e3yh9_categories.json and e3yh9_content.json files and displays the record counts in the console as shown below:

Database: my_cms
Table: e4hy3_categories

Database: my_cms
Table: e4hy3_content

 Property   Count 
 ────────── ───── 
 Categories 35
 Articles   515

Getting Help Or Making Changes

Use GitHub Issues to get help with this module.

Pull Requests gladly accepted, but only with complete documentation of what the change is, why you made it, and why you think its important to have in the module.

If this code helps you:

joomla-to-markdown

Export Joomla to Markdown

Preparing for Use

Modes of Operation

Commands

Articles

Auto

Init

Edit

Export

Categories

Clear

Export

Statistics

Getting Help Or Making Changes

Versions

Current Tags

Version History

Package Sidebar

Install

Repository

Homepage

Weekly Downloads

Version

License

Unpacked Size

Total Files

Last publish

Collaborators

joomla-to-markdown

Export Joomla to Markdown

Preparing for Use

Modes of Operation

Commands

Articles

Auto

Init

Edit

Export

Categories

Clear

Export

Statistics

Getting Help Or Making Changes

Versions

Current Tags

Version History

Package Sidebar

Install

Repository

Homepage

DownloadsWeekly Downloads

Version

License

Unpacked Size

Total Files

Last publish

Collaborators

Weekly Downloads