While we haven’t done any Plone consulting (well, *any* consulting to be exact) in over 3 years, we still use Plone internally, every single day. It was about time our Intranet got some love, so I put on my disco pants, poured some of Belgium’s finest and got to work.
Our installation was an old Plone 4.1 one. It was about 3 years since we last touched it (apart from applying security hotfixes, obviously). The first task was to clean up and update our buildout environment. Mostly throwing things away. I like my Plone vanilla flavored. What followed was making sure our tests still pass and enabling Travis CI for the project.
Then came the upgrade to a new major version of Plone. The Plone 5. And let me tell you how the upgrade went:
- Bump version to 5.0.6, make sure buildout uses version pins that come with Plone 5.0.6.
- Run buildout & restart server.
- Click a big honking “Upgrade” button.
- Crack open another beer.
I mean seriously, people! Why can’t all software have such smooth upgrade paths!? Plonistas, you have my utmost respect.
Back in the Plone 4.1 days we still had Archetypes, an ancient framework for defining types of content, but Plone 5 is all about Dexterity, so I migrated that too. With a click of a button. Zero hassle once again.
What followed was some throwing content around, updating workflows and permissions to match our company structure and that was mostly it. Oh yeah and I released a Plone 5 remake of our old “niteoweb.loginas” add-on, now promptly named “collective.impersonate“.
If felt good to do some Plone after such a long time. I was surprised how polished the version 5 is. The docs are miles better than what I remember, the UI is fantastic and the thing is now really snappy.
That said, there’s a few more things I would like to get done:
- increase portal max width to ~1200px
- fix a styling bug in State tab in toolbar
- red font color for private items in Navigation and Sidebar
- and a few more minor tweaks here and there
Are you a Plone freelancer who can take care of these for us? Shoot us an email to jobs at niteoweb.com! Bonus karma points for getting your fixes merged upstream.
