Kunena Topic to Article

Documentation in Russian: 🇷🇺 Русский

A component for automatically creating Joomla articles based on Kunena forum topics. Developed for Joomla 5 and Kunena 6.x.

📖 Post relations in Kunena, info block, parsing, languages | ℹ️ Emails about article creation, database encoding, plugin

🚀 General Information

1.1. Purpose

The Kunena Topic to Article component (kunenatopic2article) automatically generates Joomla articles based on Kunena forum topics.

• ✅ Requires Joomla 5 and Kunena 6.x
• ✅ Works in the Joomla administrator area
• ✅ Tested on Joomla 5.4 / Kunena 6.3.10

1.2. Component Parameters

📄 Created Article Parameters

• Topic ID (first post ID of the topic)¹
• Article Category (selected from a dropdown list of site article categories)
• Post Transfer Scheme (sequential or threaded), see section 7
• Maximum Article Size (number of characters, default 40000), see section 2.2

ℹ️ Post Info Block Parameters

(have "Hide" / "Show" values except for the last two)

• Post Author - determined by the topic
• Post Creation Date - taken from the post
• Post Creation Time - taken from the post
• Post Title - taken from the post²
• Link to Kunena Post - shows the post index as a link, see section 4.1
• Post Relation - shows the connection between a post and its parent post (e.g., #42 ⟸ #35)
• Reminder Excerpt Length - number of characters shown from the parent message (0-300)
• Ignored Authors - usernames (comma-separated) whose posts are not transferred to created articles

¹ ID is displayed in the upper right corner of the post after the # sign when the "Show real post ID" option is enabled in Kunena
² Currently, Kunena defines post title as "Topic Title" or RE:"Topic Title"

🎨 CSS Styles

Styles define the appearance of articles (default - almost standard) and the formatting of the info block. The stylesheet /media/com_kunenatopic2article/css/kun_p2a.css can be edited in com_kunenatopic2article.zip or directly on the server without reinstalling the component.

1.3. Installation

1. Install the component from the com_kunenatopic2article.zip file through the Joomla extensions manager
2. The component will automatically create the kunenatopic2article_params table (one row) in the database
3. Additionally, a precise positioning plugin is available, see section 8

⚙️ Basic Information About Component Operation

2.1. Component Management

When calling the component, four buttons are available:

Button	Purpose
✅ Remember	Validates and saves parameters
🔄 Reset Parameters	Returns settings to defaults
👁️ Preview	Shows the first two posts with the info block
🚀 Create Articles	Generates one or more articles based on the topic

The "Preview" and "Create Articles" buttons are activated after successful parameter saving.

2.2. Article Creation

• The topic author is assigned as the article author
• The first article gets the title "Topic"
• When the size limit is exceeded, articles are created with numbering: "Topic. Part 2", "Topic. Part 3", etc.
• If a single post exceeds the maximum size, an article is created containing only that post

2.3. Service Lines

Information is placed at the beginning of each article:

• ℹ️ "This article is automatically generated from a similar topic on the Kunena forum of this site."
• ⚠️ "Since both the article and the posts in the topic may be edited after the creation of this article, the correspondence between the content and design of the article and the topic may be broken."

2.4. Post Filtering

Only the following are transferred to articles:

• Published posts (hold = 0)
• Posts by authors not listed in "Ignored Authors"

2.5. Post Info Block

Displayed before each post if at least one of the info block parameters is enabled. When all parameters are disabled, posts are separated by a subtle line. See section 4.

2.6. Markup Preservation

• All links are preserved
• "Bare" URLs (without explanatory text) are shortened to 50 characters
• Attachment images are copied as links to these attachments in Kunena folders
• See also section 5 Parsing

2.7. Example of an article based on the topic

📊 Article Creation Results

3.1. Execution Report

After processing the topic, the following are displayed:

• Created Articles - list with IDs and article names, as well as links to them
• Emails Sent - list of email addresses to which the component sent notifications about article creation. See also section 10.

3.2. Further Action Options

Below the article list, there are two buttons:

• 🔄 Continue Work - opens the form with saved parameters (only Topic ID is reset)
• 🏁 Finish Work - ends the current session

3.3. Connection Between Articles and Topic

Created articles and posts in the topic "live their own lives" after the component runs and can be edited independently. The exception is links in articles to post indices, if they were created. When clicking such a link, the corresponding post on the forum opens in a neighboring browser tab. If a post is deleted after article creation, the link may stop working.

🙏 Acknowledgments

This component includes code from chriskonnertz/bbcode parser for BBCode to HTML conversion. (MIT License). Huge thanks to Chris Konnertz! The BBCode parser code remains under its original MIT License, while the rest of the component is GPL-2.0-or-later.

Of course, I am grateful to the Kunena developers, whose forum I use on my sites for many years.

✋ Support

If you like this project, you can make a donation via PayPal:

👉 https://paypal.me/lemiratGiCh

---

➡️ Post relations in Kunena, info block, parsing, languages
➡️ Emails about article creation, database encoding, plugin