Migration Services

Why upgrade?

Using the latest version of Plone can give your site increased substance, as newer releases usually come with more variety and ease-of-use in the built-in features. Upgrading also ensures that your site will be easily updated when you need new functionalities are added.

The migration process

Six Feet Up usually starts by reviewing existing code against the specifications of the latest version of Plone to identify the elements that will need to be migrated, including:

• CSS rules
• Custom content types
• Third-party products
• Custom Membership Setup
• Existing Deployment Strategies
• Custom Folder Usage

Following this comparison, Six Feet Up puts together a detailed estimate related to the proposed migration effort that includes a review of potential conflicts and/or recommended code updates.

Upgrading to a newer version of Plone typically includes:

• Bringing all current templates up to date with the latest Plone best practices
• Merging catalogs
• Setting up buildout for development/deployment
• Moving Custom Folder items into products
• Safely migrating the data to the newer version

The goal at Six Feet Up is to make your migration as easy as possible while ensuring that you have all of the tools that you need to keep your website up-to-date, informative and interesting.

Product Compatibility

As we move to Plone 4, we will need to migrate Plone products you might be using, such as PloneFormGen, Lineage, Plone4Artists, etc.

As Plone 4 approaches its first stable release, more and more products are updated to be Plone 4 compatible. The following list is an overview of some of the products we tested:

We also got some input from our fellow Plone developers regarding the following products:

• Compatible:
• RelStorage (added, installed, used)
• GetPaid (added, installed, used)
• Products.Collage (mostly works, one minor issue with icons; reported to bug tracker)
• collective.collage.portlets (seems okay)
• collective.twitterportlet (seems okay and works)
• collective.easyslider (apply slider to folders ok, and JS all working; actually better with adding slides than Plone 3)
• plone.app.ldap (and associated underlying packages)
• collective.ckeditor (alpha but working good)
• collective.plonefinder (idem)
• Not yet compatible:
• Products.CacheSetup (Zope wouldn't start due to certain imports)
• Products.PloneHelpCentre 3.0b3 (apparently branch in the works)
• Products.Ploneboard 2.1b2 (apparently branch in the works)
• Products.QuillsEnabled 1.7.0 (blogs can't be applied)
• webcourtier.dropdownmenu 2.0 (breaks themes etc)

Finally, for a listing of all the products that claim to be Plone 4 compatible by their authors, you can visit the plone.org  release search page.