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.

One thought on “Plone 2.0.5 to 2.1 Migration”

  1. >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.

    Solved this problem. I just needed to update the portal catalog. Plone 2.1 uses the catalog for directory listings.

Comments are closed.

comments powered by Disqus