Howto migrate to Plone 2.1.1

David Diskin:
Plone 2.1.1 has been out for some time now.  Can anyone give me an  estimate of when some good migration document will be available to  explain steps and variations in going from 2.0.5 to 2.1.1

Alexander Limi:

There are no special steps. There are a few gotchas that people are  running into along the way regarding third-party products (that's always  hard to predict), and we're working on collecting these in a centralized  location.

The procedure is the normal one:

1. Make sure the third-party products you use have been updated or verified  to work on Plone 2.1
2. Install the new Plone version
3. Move over your Data.fs and any Products / External Methods
4. Start the new Zope/Plone
5. Go to the ZMI
6. Go to portal_migration
7.  Click the migrate button

Raphael Ritz:

My estimate would be: never  :-(

Individual situations are so different that I'm afraid there
will be no general answer to this.

•   it may not work to upgrade Plone and some 3rd Party product  in one step (example: my CMFBibliographyAT in it's most recent  version needs its own migration when you have content generated  using an older version of it. This is usually meant to be  triggered by reinstalling it - so you either upgrade it before  migrating your Plone or afterwards. Maybe other products have  similar implications.)
•  For reasons I won't get into here, I had a site with some content  items where the executable ownership was broken  (the path to the user folder where the account was defined was wrong).  This prevented the in-place migration to fail completely  (even if 'force migration' was selected).  Fixing the ownership in the original site resolved this.
• For reasons I don't know, it may help to do the ATCT migration first  in some cases! That is, update everything on the file system, copy  Data.fs, restart Zope and then access the site's quickinstaller to  install ATContentTypes.  Then go to the the portal_atct tool, do a 'version  migration' followed by a 'type migration'. Now a 'portal_migration'  migration (!) might have more chances of getting through.  (I was really surprized about this. It was just last week that I  had this situation with a site where the migration from the  migration tool couldn't even be forced but everything was nice and dandy when decomposed as outlined above. Again, I have no idea why.)
  

Nick Davis:
Forgive my ignorance, but I struggle to understand why having  third-party products installed would break the migration of Plone. It  makes sense that, after migration, these products might stop rendering  due to incompatible customisations etc, in the same way that they  wouldn't work if you installed them in a fresh Plone 2.1 instance, but  why do they cause the data migration to break?

Alexander Limi:

Because products can do *anything* to an existing instance (even down to  monkeypatching Zope and overriding behaviour there). There is no way we  can guard against this.

Nick Davis:
How does migration of the core of Plone touch external Products?

Alexander Limi:

It doesn't. Plone changes, is improved, refactored, deprecated methods are  removed - and the responsibility of keeping up with this rests on the  Product author, not the Plone Team.

Nick Davis:
One of our products seems to basically work if installed in an empty  Plone 2.1 site, yet apparently its existence may be contributing to data  migration failing.


Alexander Limi:

Then it's probably putting in some structures that the migration can't  handle. The migration code has been made more robust, but in 95% of the  cases it's something wrong with the way that product does things. In the 5  remaining percent, we fix the migration.

Testing migrations is a time-consuming process, and if you're not  responsible enough to test migration during the beta and RC releases, we  can't predict what will go wrong in your specific case.

---

Alexander Limi announced Plone Setup List :

With the recent influx of new users to Plone, and with the people looking  to migrate from earlier versions to Plone 2.1, we felt that it was time to  create a dedicated list to help the new users get a good first experience  with Plone, hunt down migration problems in an efficient and structured  manner, and be able to give advice on configuration and setup of Plone  sites in general.

As these tasks are normally of a different nature than helping people to  work with ZPT, Python and HTML, we think it deserves a dedicated forum -  hence the creation of the Setup list.

Subscribe / read this list on Gmane if you:

• Need help with installation of Plone
• Need help migrating a Plone instance
• Need help with setting up caching

And finally, but most importantly:

• Want to help others with the above!

Please use the new mailing list for all questions of this type, and refer  any users posting questions of this nature to the Setup list.

The subscription details:

Mailing list subscription:
http://lists.plone.org/mailman/listinfo/setup


Plone setup Mailing list archives will be available from Gmane (when it is approved)  and from:
http://lists.plone.org/pipermail/setup/