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Last night I bravely decided to upgrade claytron.com to the latest Plone release. Luckily I already converted it over to a buildout based install a couple months back. This was pivotol in my speedy migration effort since it allowed me to switch products in and out so effortlessly.

This site is fairly simple since I'm only using a couple add-on products. Quills is the primary product I use. The old site was running Plone 2.1.4 and Quills 1.5 RC3. I tried to go directly to 3.1.7, but the portal_migration failed. Rather than try and debug that nasty error, I decided to migrate to the latest 2.5 release first. This was a complete success!

Next, I updated the buildout with all the Plone 3 compatible versions of the products. Then changed the plone recipe to point to the latest 3.1.x release. After that, I ran the buildout and started the site back up. Now it was time to try the portal_migration again. It blew up again, but with a less painful error. Quills 1.6 and above no longer uses a custom workflow and therefore made something unhappy. All I had to do was set the weblog types back to the default Plone workflow and try again. This was a success!

Next up was the Quills migration. This is automatically run while quickinstalling Products.Quills in the portal_quickinstaller. No issues here either. There are some Quills artifacts that have to be removed by hand including the quills_tool, RPCAuth, blog archive folder and blog drafts folder. Also, I didn't like the way the beta of quills.app handled the addition of the portlets to the weblog. It's currently creating a new 'category' of portlets by interface that has no way of managing them through the Plone interface. I posted a hint on the Quills dev list on how to remove them via a debug session.

Lastly I needed to update my custom theme. I moved all my main_template customizations into custom viewlets. Any template overrides were re-integrated using z3c.jbot. Then I removed my Install.py in favor of a GenericSetup profile. That was it! Now I'm ready to upgrade to Plone 3.2 when it gets released in the not too distant future :)

Now that I'm on the Plone 3 series I was able to quickly install CacheFu via an egg. That should help my site's performance quite a bit out of the gate. I also installed the python markdown package and added the transform so I can write in plain text anywhere in Markdown, then copy paste into the site. Thanks to tomster for evangelizing it, I was sold after reading the philosophy and synopsis. This post was written in Markdown, and hopefully many more... :)