I looked into a migration of the ODFAuthors site to a current Plone version with the data from the website yesterday. It took me a lot of hours to figure out the most easy way to do this. I tried to migrate from LinguaPlone to the new multilingual Plone plug-in first, but without success. I could update the buildout inside a test environment with the new plug-in, but I wasn’t able to migrate the content to the new framework. And even I wasn’t able to get rid of LinguaPlone. I didn’t get the option to remove it. I got always a traceback and found some users that run into the same issue without a solution. Thus I had to change my strategy. I exported the content that I need to migrate, set up a new and clean Plone 4.3.x environment and tried to updated it to the latest version of 4.3. I had to do some editing on the buildout and had to drop some Plone add-ons from the current buildout script of ODFAuthors. Once I had done this the buildout runs fine and I got a clean new Plone environment. Then I added the plug-ins plone.app.contenttypes and Products.contentmigration to the buildout script and run buildout again. I started the Plone instance, created a new Plone site and imported the content (exported from the current ODFAuthors site).
I activated the plug-in plone.app.contenttypes and run the migration scripts from Products.contentmigration. I had to migrate more than 4200 content objects and took a fair amount of time. But in the end the migration from the old Archetype content types to the new Dexterity ones was successful.
The next step would be the migration of the instance from Plone 4.3.x to Plone 5.0.x or 5.1.x.
Monat: Juni 2018
First Step To Improve ODFAuthors
If the website ODFAuthors should be improved for the future use the first step would be the change of the localization framework from the old LinguaPlone to the current
plone.app.multilingual and migrate and reindex all content objects. It’s not possible to update the site to the latest Plone without that step.
I already created a Plone buildout for an upgraded ODFAuthors website that is based on version 5.1.x. This buildout is available from the Github repository of The Document Foundation: https://github.com/tdf/odfauthors.org
Extension Website With Updated Plone Add-Ons
I finished my work on the update of the two Plone add-ons which I used for the LibreOffice extensions and templates website. I published a new release for each of them. Today I updated the website with the new features of this add-ons. I run a buildout script for this. The site was only a few minutes offline and is available already again.
It is possible to remove items from the list of available licenses without side effects for already published releases with the outdated (etc.) licenses now.
Working On A New Feature For LibreOffice Extensions-Templates Website
The LibreOffice extensions and templates website runs on the Content Management System (CMS) Plone and uses some plug-ins that I created. I’m currently working on a new feature for this plug-ins, which make possible to remove licenses from the selectable list without any issues for former releases with such licenses.
New Buildout For ODFAuthors Nearly Finished
I worked very hard on the new Plone buildout for the ODFAuthors website during the last days. I nearly finished the buildout today. I created a new policy and a theming product for the site. I added a template for the frontpage of the new website and am waiting for the input about the content, that the new frontpage should show.
I also need some suggestions on the new publication workflow of the site. The Plone workflow tool is able to run very subtle grained ones. The Plone Content Management System is also able to send automatic messages on all events like changing the workflow state.
Installation Of OpenSUSE Leap 15.0
I installed the latest OpenSUSE Leap distribution to a notebook. The installation tooks about half an hour and the new KDE Plasma desktop looks very well. It’s always easy and fast to install a new Linux distro these days. If I would have tried to do the same with a current MS Windows on the same machine, I wouldn’t have finished yet (but not sure, if the machine would be able to run a current version).
Continious Integration For New Plone Environment Passed
I worked on an update of my new Plone environment to the current version 5.1.x today. I had to add and edit some files to my git repository. I got a successful local build first. I added a travis.yml file to the repository and enabled the building process on Travis. It needed some further edits but in the end it builds on Travis too and the new development buildout for an updated odfauthors site showed a green button.
Creating A New Plone Development Environment
I worked on the first bits for a new Plone development environment. I’ll use this to create a new website for the ODFAuthors team. The new site should run on Plone 5.1 or later. Maybe it is possible to upgrade the site to a Plone version that runs on Python 3.
I read already on a blog of a Plone developer that Core-Plone is already ported to Python 3, but that there are a big bunch of tests that are not yet ported and need some love (and work time).
View From Outside An Inner Circle
The perception of an organization most often differs between people who are members of the inner circle and the public (public area of the organization). As a member of the inner circle oneself may have a belief about this view from 10 thousend feet hight, but that’s often only an idea. So am I.
If you are inside the inner circle you get a lot of messages, take place in discussions and had to decide on some topics. You share the impression that the leading body of your organization is always busy and take action for the organizations good.
I left the inner circle (due to no further candidacy) some month ago and got a different view now. I got – like others in the (organization) public – only little or no information about the work of the bodies of the organization (not even about the next meeting time etc. of the leading body). This opens my eyes and I’m able to comphrehend the view of other project members much better now. Thus I’m very happy that I took the decision to not stand for a candidacy again. It’s always good to change your view, thus you could understand the other position (view).
Python 2 Support Stopps In About 1 And A Half Year
The Plone developers work hard to port the CMS to Python 3 before the support for Python 2 ends. This will be in about 1 and a half year from now. LibreOffice made this step a longer time ago and comes currently with Python 3.5.4. Thus the LibreOffice Python programming environment and connection will get updates and security fixes after the end of 2019 too.
If you use another office suite with Python support you should take a closer look into the supported / delivered version. If it is not Python 3 yet have an eye on alternatives in time.