Challenge
Dominican University had been running their public-facing website on Plone 4 and wanted to leverage the most recent technology improvements from the Plone Community by upgrading to Plone 5. Security and ease of use were high on the list of concerns.
Six Feet Up helped Dominican University with architecting the future solution, designing a content and product migration plan, performing the upgrade and necessary customizations, rolling out and hosting the new website.
The Zope database had issues and the university was experiencing rocky deployments. Some of the site's old Plone 4 add-ons were not compatible with Plone 5 so Six Feet Up researched options and provided recommendations for replacements.
Dominican University also requested that Google Authentication be incorporated to authenticate staff and students on the site.
Implementation Details
Six Feet Up performed the content migration using collective.jsonmigrator and transmogrify.dexterity by creating a migration package and setting up an import pipeline. Old CSS bootstrap class names were converted to new ones. News collections were created in an upgrade step. Hundreds of manually custom-made portlets were especially complex to migrate and had to be refactored and simplified.
On the front-end side, Six Feet Up ran the existing Diazo theme on Plone 5 and made several necessary adjustments, especially to the mega menu and the slideshows.
To facilitate deployment, the Six Feet Up team cleaned up the buildout file and set up a best practice release management process.
Finally, the site was deployed on one of Six Feet Up's private clouds.
Results
The new Dominican University website was launched in the spring of 2018 and content contributors have commented on how much easier and user-friendly the new editing interface is. The site is also a lot faster than it was in the past.
