Websites Report April-May 2007

May
After the Plone website was upgraded in April we moved hosts to High Speed Rails.  This is a temporary move until Obsidian upgrade their Plone instances to Plone 2.5.2. some time this year.  Two days after we redirected our sub domain vic.computerbank.org.au to High Speed Rails the server we were on became unstable  all zope instances were moved to a new server.  This meant we had to redirect our sub domain to a different ip address.  The site was unstable for a couple of days until the redirection was completed by LUV.

This year's cbv minutes on the Silva site were placed into monthly folders to keep them in the same format as Jessica's migratiion work last year.

April
Computerbank's main website has been upgraded and the content migrated
to the latest stable version of Plone. This has been a move from 2004
code to 2007 code. It was necessary to upgrade because it wasn't
possible to add new members, the site had a security flaw which we
were dealing with on a day to day basis, plus a couple of minor
things.

During the upgrade I culled over 150 inactive members from site.
These were members who had joined but had never added any content in
their personal folders.
Computerbank members who wish to add to wiki's will most likely have
to join the site
again.  Click on the join form and follow the onscreen instructions.
http://vic.computerbank.org.au/

TECHNICAL DETAILS:
Plone was upgraded from Plone 2.0rc2 to Plone 2.5.2.  It is now
running on Zope 2.9.7-final, Python 2.4.4, Freebsd6. Plone 2.5.2 has
extensive use of Zope 3 technologies throughout, improved Pluggable
Authentication Service, support for XML exports of site
configurations, resource compression of css and js files to speed up
page loads, new caching infrastructure, Placeful Workflow, Drag and
Drop of folder contents using AJAX, new catalog recovery mechanism,
additional security.

Upgrading such an old site brought with it some difficulties and took
a couple of months of spare time to resolve.  All testing and
upgrading was done on a duplicate site so the live site was never
offline.

Plone 2 to Plone 2.1 release represented 18 months of development and
improvements, the entire content type structure was rewritten.  In
hindsight the developers say they should have called this upgrade
Plone 3. The developers warn upgrading may cause some pain and it did.

I established a Plone 2.5.2 site and then imported a .zexp of our
Plone 2.0r2 content.  I then used the migration upgrade script and the
content upgrade script on the imported content.

The freshly upgraded site had the following problems. I am detailing
them in case others go through the same pain. After the upgrade it was
not possible to add and edit documents or news items. The login,
registration and join areas were broken. Unwanted tabs appeared in the
navigation bar and the stylesheet was broken.  It was possible however
to view existing content and enter the Zope Management Interface and
edit as Manager.

SOLUTIONS

1. Unable to add or edit documents:

In /portal_skins I removed the epoz folder. Doing this allowed me to
add and edit documents and news items however without a wysiwyg
editor.  Kupu was installed but it didn't work when selected in
mypreferences. On checking on Plone.org they suggested running the
sample-kupu-customisation

-policy script located in
/portal_skins/kupu_plone.  I did this and then was able to add
documents and news items and edit them.

2. Broken login, join and registration forms:

Removed some custom login, join and registration scripts in
/portal_skins/custom.

3. Broken stylesheets:

Removed the depreciated stylesheet in /portal_skins/custom.

4. Unwanted folder tabs:

Under Site Setup/Navigation Settings I deselected the Automatically
generated tabs to remove additional unwanted folders appearing as tabs
in the portal.

5. The site contains one add on product Zwiki.  The Zwiki contents
upgraded perfectly with the exception of one broken link.

PLONE
The Plone community is continually growing  - thousands of
organisations around the world now use Plone. The development focus
has matured in recent years and the emphasis is on stability first,
innovation second.  Plone has 8 projects in the Google Summer of Code,
Zope has 4 and Python 11 projects.  The Plone community has 29 mailing
lists - these can be searched at nabble.com For more on Plone see
Plone.org