Plone 2.0.5 to 2.1 Migration

OK, so the time has come to upgrade a few Plone 2.0.5 sites to Plone 2.1. I am currently working on 3 sites:

  • Dataface
  • GRUVI (A lab in the School of Computing Science at SFU)
  • FAS (Faculty of Applied Sciences Website)

The FAS site is the most difficult migration by far as it contains a number of template and style modifications, and 5 or 6 custom content-types.

Dataface

The Dataface site went pretty smoothly (although there are still a few glitches like the phase ‘Glossary Definitions’ always being displayed as the page name in portal_breadcrumbs). For this site I simply exported the plone site from the old Zope instance (running Plone 2.0.5 and Zope 2.8.5) and imported it into the new zope instance (running Plone 2.1.2 and Zope 2.8.5), copied the products over (upgrading them if necessary), ran the migration tool, updated all of the schemas using archetype_tool, applied a patch to allow Epoz to work properly, and voila! It is now up and running (sort of).

GRUVI

The GRUVI migration went simlar to the Dataface migration except that I had to delete some content because it relied on products that didn’t work with Plone 2.1 (CMFBoard).

FAS

I could be spending a few weeks on this one 🙁

The FAS site is a huge site (over a gigabyte) with 5 or 6 custom content types and multiple changes made to the templates. The process thus far has gone like this:

  • Exported Plone instance from old site (took 3 minutes or so)
  • Copied products from old site to new site
  • Imported Plone instance into new site (took 30 minutes for each attempt — 3 failed attempts before success)
  • Deleted problematic content in a user’s folder that prevented migration tool from working.
  • Ran the migration tool. Took 30 minutes
  • Updated Archetypes schemas using archetype_tool
  • At this point you couldn’t load the site because of site errors.
  • Deleted all custom templates so that customized look and feel are gone — now just using default plone look and feel
  • Still site errors
  • Removed ACASUserFolder and replaced with fresh copy.
  • Now site works but some of the custom content types aren’t showing up

The next obstacle is to find out why none of the custom content types are working. The content types were all generated with ArchGenXML 1.4.1. They seem to work fine when you go to view or edit the objects directly but the folder listings (of multiple objects) display “broken” for each object. Can’t find any documentation that says that ArchGenXML 1.4.1 has compatibility issues with Plone 2.1.2, so I am spinning my tires at this point.

I have now spent 5 hours solid working on the FAS migration. I have checked in at the Plone IRC chatroom but nobody has anything helpful to say other than “Find out what is breaking it”.

Now I must venture into the untamed world of plone documentation to try to find out how to find out what is wrong with the products… argh..

Still getting the feeling that Plone is more trouble than it’s worth right now. This is the pain of being an early adopter, I guess.

Dataface 0.5.2 released

I have added a Javascript calendar widget to Dataface for editing DATE and DATETIME fields. I have also fixed some issues involved with running Dataface on a shared host in safe mode. These changes are part of version 0.5.2. Check out the latest in Dataface at http://fas.sfu.ca/dataface.

On a side note, I have been very happy with the response for Dataface since releasing it to the public on February 28th. I have received a number of comments from developers around the world saying that they really like the software. It is exciting to be able to contribute something useful to the developer community and I hope that I can continue to contribute. I would love to turn Dataface into a household name, but for now I’ll setting for the slow and steady increase in awareness that seems to be happening right now.

Also, I have to express my amazement at the power of freshmeat.net. Every time I release a new version and post it on freshmeat.net, I get an influx of 300 hits or so, and a large amount of downloads. In addition, it seems to pop up all over the internet on other websites that show freshmeat’s new releases. Freshmeat is an awsome solution for open-source software promotion.