I’m in the preliminary/research stages of upgrading Plinkit and other Plone 2.1.2 (yes, I know!) sites to Plone 2.5.3. The nice thing is that I have two separate machines to play with so my existing production system can remain untouched — when you work for a state government, things like having a separate development and production system can feel like a luxury

So first comes the Plone 2.5.3 Unified Installer love. LOVE IT! I had heard a lot of great things about it but had not had the chance to actually use it before. Well, you just download the package, run the install script and watch the messages fly across the screen. LOVE IT!

Next came plopping the production Data.fs file into the new install. That didn’t work out so well. Basically, Zope kept restarting, too quickly and finally died a critical death. Hrm. Not encouraging.

But that’s alright, I thought. The night before, I had managed to do a mini-upgrade of the Plinkit template site on my Windows box at home (!!). I figured I could just export a working 2.5.3 Plone site from there and import it into my Linux/Plone 2.5.3 install at work. As it turns out, not quite. The import failed with the following message:

Error Value: Input MIME type 'text/x-web-markdown' for transform
markdown_to_html is not registered in the MIME types registry

Huh? Really, the .zexp import from the same version of Zope/Plone should work. Well, luckily for me, Bryan from #plone came to the rescue. By adding the ‘text/x-web-markdown’ and ‘text/x-web-textile’ MIME types in the mimetypes_registry in the original site and re-exporting, the import was successful.

Emboldened by my success, I decided to see about exporting a Plone 2.1.2 site (after adding the above MIME types!) and importing it directly into Plone 2.5.3. Success! And in fact, both portal_migration and portal_atct/migration ran fine as well.

Now, I just need to go back and see if I can’t do it “properly” by moving my Data.fs file from the Plone 2.1.2 install to the Plone 2.5.3 install. Perhaps next week!