Upgrade tips

Description

Advanced tips for upgrading Plone.

Some of the information on this page is for Plone 4, which used the Archetypes content type framework. Plone 5.x uses the Dexterity content type framework.

General Tips

This guide contains some tips for Plone upgrades. For more information, see also the official Plone upgrade guide

Fix persistent utilities

You might need to clean up some leftovers from uninstalled add-ons which have not cleanly uninstalled.

Use this utility:

Note

Perform this against old buildout

Content Upgrades

For content migrations, Products.contentmigration can help you. Documentation on how to use it can be found on plone.org.

Migration from non-folderish to folderish Archetypes based content types

Non-folderish content types are missing some BTree attributes, which folderish content types have (See Products.BtreeFolder2.BTreeFolder2Base._initBtrees ).

plone.app.folder provides an upgrade view to migrate pre-plone.app.folder (or non-folderish) types to the new BTree based implementation (defined in: plone.app.folder.migration.BTreeMigrationView).

To upgrade your non-folderish content types to folderish ones, just call @@migrate-btrees on your Plone site root, and you’re done.

This applies to Archetypes based content types.

Upgrading theme

Make sure that your site them works on Plone 4. Official upgrade guide has tips how the theme codebase should be upgraded.

Theme fixing and portal_skins

Your theme might be messed up after upgrade.

Try playing around setting in portal_skins Properties tab. You can enable, disable and reorder skins layer applied in the theme.

Upgrade may change the default theme and you might want to restore custom theme in portal_skins.

Upgrade tips for plone.app.discussion

Enabling plone.app.discussion after Plone 4.1 upgrade

After migration from an earlier version of Plone, you will may notice that you do not have a Discussion control panel for plone.app.discussion, the new commenting infrastructure which now ships as part of new Plone installs beyond version 4.1. If a check of your Site Setup page reveals that you do not have the Discussion control panel, implement the following.

Install plone.app.discussion manually

  1. Log into your Plone site as a user with Manager access

  2. Browse to the following URL to manually install plone.app.discussion:

    http://<your-plone-url>:<port>/<plone-instance>/portal_setup/manage_importSteps

  3. In the Select Profile or Snapshot drop-down menu, select Plone Discussions.

  4. Click the Import all steps button at the bottom of the page.

  5. Confirm that Discussion is now present as a control panel in your Site Setup

Fixing Creator details on existing comments

You may notice that some of your site’s comments have the user’s ID as their Creator property. At time of writing (for plone.app.discussion==2.0.10), the Creator field should refer to the user’s full name and not their user ID. You’ll likely notice that a number of other fields, including author_username, author_name and author_email are not present on some of your migrated comments. Reasons why comments get migrated but unsuccessfully are being investigated.

This may change for future versions of plone.app.discussion. For now, though, having the user ID left as the Creator is less than helpful and means aspects like the username, name, and email not present affect usability of comments.

If a site has many comments with this issue, it is possible to step through all of them and correct them. Using a script like the following will process each of the affected comments accordingly:

from Products.CMFPlone.utils import getToolByName
from zope.app.component import hooks
from plone import api

context = hooks.getSite()

catalog = api.portal.get_tool(name='portal_catalog')
mtool = api.portal.get_tool(name='portal_membership')

brains = catalog.searchResults(object_provides='plone.app.discussion.interfaces.IComment')
for brain in brains:
    member = api.user.get(username=brain.Creator')
    comment = brain.getObject()

    if member and not comment.author_username and not comment.author_name and not comment.author_email:
        fullname = member.getProperty('fullname')
        email = member.getProperty('email')
        if fullname and email:
            comment.author_username = brain.Creator #our borked user ID
            comment.creator = fullname
            comment.author_name = fullname
            comment.author_email = email
            comment.reindexObject()
            print 'Fixed and reindexed %s' % comment
        else:
            print 'Could not find properties for author of %s' % comment

This can be run anywhere an Acquisition context object is available, such as running your Zope instance in debug mode, an ipython prompt, or some other function on the filesystem. The getSite() function call can (and may need to) be replaced with some other pre-existing context object if that is more suitable.

Keep in mind that this script was successfully used in a situation where no possible collisions existed between correctly-migrated comments Creators’ full names and user IDs (the code looks up the Creator in the hope of finding a valid Plone member). If you had a situation where you had some correctly migrated comments written by a user with ID david and full name of Administrator, and also had a user with the ID of Administrator, then this script may not be suitable. In the test situation, the three attributes of author_username, author_name, and author_email were observed as all being None, so in checking for this too, this may avoid problems. Test the code first with something like a print statement to ensure all comments will get modified correctly.