If you love your plone data, set it free…

Posted on November 21, 2006October 5, 2023 by Rick Hurst

If you can get it back into version 2.5 then the data belongs to plone, otherwise it never belonged to plone in the first place..

I’m still undecided and a bit lost about how i’m going to get www.dfrskatezine.com upgraded from 2.1 to plone 2.5

To recap:-

I can’t really upgrade it in situ (although could be persuaded to try it if people think this is the best bet)
portal zexp import didn’t work for me
smaller zexp imports left me with broken stuff.
it is on a shared instance so the data.fs file is too big to move realistically (once again, still an option if encouraged)

so…I’ve started creating some zpts that I can use to dump content as xml files (e.g. all_articles.xml, containing title, content, url and any other data I need to move – kind of RSS on acid). Not quite XMLforest, but I haven’t got my head round that yet as I live in the skin layer mostly. The masterplan is to then use some python foo magic to populate a fresh 2.5.most_recent_stable site from this XML.

Obviously I need to handle the images and other files seperately – so far I have used a skin script to generate a file containing wget statements for each visible/published image on the site and download the images with a mirrored folder structure, along with an accompanying xml file with the captions, descriptions and paths. I intend to rebuild my products from scratch (pop my zope 3 cherry even?) so I don’t necessarily need my existing products to be 2.5 compatible.

Think i’m going about this the wrong way? Please let me know! Please also bear in mind that while I am a keen student, I am mostly a GUI guy (+ basic archetypes development), and am easily confused by your crazy python talk, and have been made weak by your excellent installers, to the point that I haven’t got a clue how you would go about installing or upgrading zope if it requires me to do anything more than click buttons 😉

archived comments

You might want to look into GenericSetup. There was a talk at the Plone conf about it. http://plone.org/events/conferences/seattle-2006/presentations/PloneConference2006-GenericSetup.pdf/view

Also check out CMFFolderExport: http://palladion.com/home/tseaver/software/CMFFolderExport

Good luck.

skeeter 2006-11-21 17:23:40

Moving the Data.fs is the recommended (and only guaranteed) way that this’ll work. Your time is too valuable for you to waste it re-building XML support. 😉

Just remember to pack the database from the control panel before transferring it, and it should be a decent size (depending on the content, of course).

Alexander Limi 2006-11-21 18:06:21

There’s ArcheCSV that you could try: http://plone.org/products/archecsv. Walk over your content types with a page template and create a .csv out of it and use ArcheCSV to import it. It looks like you have ~40 or so articles so it shouldn’t be too bad…

FWIW, one thing I did last week was bulk import about 500 links into a Plone portal from an unordered list of links on a single HTML page. I parsed the page with BeautifulSoup (http://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/) and used a Plone Link template (download any Link content type via WebDAV to get the template) to create individual link files that I could just upload via WebDAV.

Shane

Shane Graber 2006-11-21 19:41:38

Upgrading from 2.1 to 2.5 should be pretty painless to do in situ – just make sure you have backups, so you can revert if it for some reason should fail.

Alexander Limi 2006-11-22 12:44:23

Thanks for all your much appreciated advice – I have made a bit of progress by moving data.fs – I now have a partially functional local copy running on plone 2.5 on my mac 🙂

Rick Hurst 2006-11-22 14:14:58