V0.7 Site Upgrade

Site Construction and Upgrade

We (finally) embraced the Plone Buildout paradigm, which will make site construction and management easier. Previously, we manually checked for new packages. If there was a new version, we would download it and try to integrate it. This was a time consuming processes but we figured, since it only occurred during site construction or upgrade, it was bearable. The package list was maintained on a web page that could be processed through wget to download all the desired packages. Buildout goes one (or two) better by adding a scripting layer that checks for dependencies and where to put the package.

Having said that, Buildout is not a silver bullet. It achieves its goal, installing compatible packages while the developer is off drinking his/her double half-caf. But the package integration is only as good as the integration testing. This is almost impossible to achieve across the wide variety of packages available. However, we came across a difficult incompatibility between RichDocument and Kupu that should have been anticipated.

Site Management

We added several enhancements to make site management easier. The two significant enhancements are:

• Change the site-wide workflow from the old Plone workflow (which we had to modify somewhat) to the Plone 3.0 intranet/extranet workflow. This gives more control over content states for visibility to non-trusted and anonymous users along with control for modificiation to trusted users.
• Added view templates that inspect states to build a view of the content. Previously the templates were hard-coded, so changes required a site point-release upgrade like v0.6.4.2 Site Upgrade .