Crazy MindManager Export to web, generated 500mb + content & thousands of files, worked!

This is my last ever MindManager 6 Pro post . It’s sad to say goodbye to a great application but the day had to come. I couldn’t let it go without perhaps the ultimate export to destruction test… I...

Robin Capper

07 Jun 2007 — 3 min read

This is my last ever MindManager 6 Pro post

. It’s sad to say goodbye to a great application but the day had to come. I couldn’t let it go without perhaps the ultimate export to destruction test…

Imagine over the years you’d built a complex interlinked web of MindManager Maps to document the systems, applications & process related to your job. When it comes to archiving this information not everyone has MindManager, or even the free viewer, but they do have a web browser. If you opened MindManager and clicked “Export to Web” what would happen?

This is the Main Map. There isn’t actually much content as most topics are just links to other detailed maps. Some of those maps have similar linking up to three levels “deep”. Using a book analogy, this is the index & linked maps are like chapters. The only crafty formatting is to place a hyperlink on the central topic of all linked maps pointing back to it’s “parent”. The Right Click > Send to new linked map function will create this “link back” for you. When exported to web these links act like “go to home-page” links.

The MindManager Multi-map view shows all the maps linked to the current map.

Select all the thumbnails, click Multi-map Web Export and what happens?

You get to watch the export animator, a moving red blob, for quite a long time or you can do what I did and go for a coffee! While you do that literally thousands of HTML and Image resource files are created. There is 500mb of content, 1400+ html pages and thousands of images.

The result is a coordinated browser based export with menu, map and index access to all the content. The only customisation I’ve done is changing the default header image supplied to the company logo. The main view uses cascading menus, other options are map based (with click-able image links) or complete index (acts like a sitemap)