Archiving SMF

[Looking]

I have some SMF Communities I may wish to archive. I just want the content to be displayed with the same links to them but not have all the rest of SMF features available. I have seen the archive mod and could possibly code something similar but I want the links to current posts to remain the same but just be in a text format. My question is what do you think will be the best way to accomplish this... just create a really plain theme, disable registration and everything else and just keep it like that? I could do that but don't want to remain with all the SMF files to run an archive. Maybe take out the files that will not be needed? Looking for suggestions from anyone that may have done something similar before. Thanks.