Content Migration: Quantum Leap (Vitaliy Podoba)

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The migration of www.contentmanagementsoftware.info in an nutshell.

Plone portal migration is available and documented, but there are rough edges. Especially with content. The problems:

  • It can fail (especially when coming from Plone 2.0 and 2.1).
  • You can lose control.
  • It is an iterative (step-by-step) process.
  • There is no way back.

The more customisation, the more time is necessary to migrate the site.

The use case discussed by Vitaliy is the migration of www.contentmanagementsoftware.info (CMS.Info for short) from Plone 2.0.5 to 3.1. The quantum leap from the title refers the skipping of Plone 2.5 in the migration.

Functionality wasn’t a target in the migration, it was just about content to a clean database. The content can be transferred back and forth, even between different Plone versions. Portal types are transformed on the fly. However, the import/export isn’t perfect.

Vitaliy looked at:

Since they did not provide everything needed, additional products were created: