New Export functionality for authors.

Can we please have a button on our published stories page that can provide an output of all our own stories, documenting the following:

Name of story, category, likes, number of comments, reads, famous story tag, recommended read, competition entry and competition winner or placement.

The output should be a comma separated file or Excel spreadsheet, but the former is easier. Anything that can easily be imported into a spreadsheet in order to perform some form of statistical analysis.

It shouldn't be such a big problem to do.

Depending on the backend database, should be fairly easy, in fact, the kind of report we dash off in a day at work. Depending on the database being the kicker. Some are easier and have better report building tools than others. But I like the idea in principle.

I’ve been wishing for the ability to view or extract data about my stories too, not least so I can see how things are trending over time. It’s a very manual process right now.

That said, life is full of tasks that shouldn’t be difficult to do, but still take time - and may never get done. Sure, the underlying query should be a piece of cake, probably simple SQL, and I presume that creating a custom page that displays the data in an html table (allowing the user to copy-paste into excel) might not be hard either. I would not presume that generating a csv and then provisioning an export/download interface that reliably works on all browsers and platforms, with all datasets, is necessarily less work than a display interface, though.

Like seeker said, the ease of doing this may depend on whether this site’s platform comes with a robust report writer - and especially whether it includes solid export capability - out of the box.

I would absolutely love to have this feature, but I understand that this site’s small, busy crew have to prioritize their work.

Quote by joe71

I’ve been wishing for the ability to view or extract data about my stories too. It’s a very manual process right now, and as a result I only do it every few months.

That said, life is full of tasks that shouldn’t be difficult to do, but still take time - and may never get done. Sure, the underlying SQL query should be a piece of cake, and I presume that creating a custom page that displays the data in an html table might not be hard either. But like seeker said, the ease of doing this holistically may depend on whether this site’s content platform comes with a robust report writer that includes export functionality to csv. Otherwise you might be looking at a large coding and testing effort to ensure that it reliably works on all browsers/devices and with all datasets, also becoming something the staff have to maintain even as underlying packages change.

I would love to have this feature, but I understand that this site’s small, busy crew have to prioritize their work.

I agree with your overall premise, which is why, if the data is exported in csv format, then there is no requirement for an interface that needs to work on different browsers.

After all, we want the data to analyse not for it to look good on a Web page.

I do hope something like this can be achieved. I could write it myself as I've been in software engineering for many years.

We can sort our Media albums by Most Commented, Most Liked, and Most Viewed, and I've wondered about doing that for our stories as well... but my programming experience is primarily Commodore Basic so I won't speculate on the feasibility of making it a feature.

Quote by Chet_Morton

We can sort our Media albums by Most Commented, Most Liked, and Most Viewed, and I've wondered about doing that for our stories as well... but my programming experience is primarily Commodore Basic so I won't speculate on the feasibility of making it a feature.

Sorting in the interface could probably be achieved but you still have the problem of getting that data out into a file of some kind. That's what I'd really like, not an alternative interface where I still have to trawl through 500+ files in order to jot it all down.

Quote by Chet_Morton

We can sort our Media albums by Most Commented, Most Liked, and Most Viewed, and I've wondered about doing that for our stories as well... but my programming experience is primarily Commodore Basic so I won't speculate on the feasibility of making it a feature.

Basic listing has always been available. Open your Stories, click Search, and the Sort By drop-down. It is a manual job after that. A simple CVS as described above would be far easier. That said, I haven't the sort of numbers that would warrant using it, though it would be useful for some of the big kids here.

I've asked the developers to put this on the wishlist. As mentioned, a CSV or similar one-row-per-story export isn't difficult, it's just whether there are other things that take precedence when we get some more dev allocation.

Quote by kistinspencil

Basic listing has always been available. Open your Stories, click Search, and the Sort By drop-down.

I love it when my wishes turn out to be already true. Thanks for the info, K!

Quote by WannabeWordsmith

I've asked the developers to put this on the wishlist. As mentioned, a CSV or similar one-row-per-story export isn't difficult, it's just whether there are other things that take precedence when we get some more dev allocation.

Ready for a live push by Tuesday no doubt. 😇

Quote by simplyjohn

Ready for a live push by Tuesday no doubt. 😇

Thank you so much. That's much appreciated.