So what?

I've been asked several times what this actually means for our users. It's an under-the-hood change that most users don't notice, though we did take the opportunity to change the header and portlets to be a little less stock-plone-ish. The real answer is that Plone2 opens the door to many more future features like Forums, Blogs, Wikis, etc. because all recent development is being done against the Plone2 code. Similarly, the version of Archetypes that worked with Plone1 hasn't been current or maintained in quite some time. Plone2 comes with AT1.2, but we're running with AT1.3 in an attempt to be a bit more forward-looking.

We also included the new look for the content page with this rollout. This is (I think) a much nicer high-level view of our content than being dumped right into the 'A's of modules sorted by title. It also includes the some statistics on our content for the first time so people can see what content is the most popular. The only problem is that stats are like a drug: once you've had your first taste you always want more.

The migration

This took longer than I had expected. We had done a fair bit of customization to Plone1 to get it to behave the way we wanted it to. All of these had to be converted over to the newer Plone2 way of doing things. For some things, this was tedious, but a welcome improvement (CMFFormController), but in other cases we ran into difficulties.

The first major code problem was a bad interaction between Plone2's use of __browser_default__ and defining a 'view' action for a CMF type. We do the latter all over the place, as it's very convenient to be able to effectively subclass the Folder type in the portal_types tool and specify a new set of actions. To get this to work in Plone2 I had to Patch PloneTool.py to use check 'view' action before the default_page property.

The second problem was that there was no migration path from AT1.0 to AT1.2/3. Fortunately I was able to put in some backward compatibilty code into archetypes that moslty fixed this. These fixes have almost all been incorporated in AT 1.3.x releases.

The rollout

I spent a lot of effort this time around working on an automated migration script. This part worked very well. The rollout went very smoothly. The site was only down for about 27 minutes, which was the time it took to the run the migration script on the ZODB. We did find a couple bugs afterwards that had slipped through, but nothing too serious.

The future

There are several things I'd like to get into the site, now that the migration is done. CMFMember is one, so are site forums, and author profile pages. The cool features to add are almost limitless. Sadly, the hours in my day are not.