Cataract operations and gallbladder extractions might be the most common kinds of surgery on the NHS but our customers prefer a Plone migration. 

Plone.org has an online manual for those who like getting their hands dirty, but it's easy to see why many organisations like specialist help with this task.

Since the arrival of Plone 4 we've been fairly inundated with requests for information on how to upgrade sites (some as old as Plone 1.0.5) to it. Sometimes the older sites are actually simplest and quickest especially if they are sites that were setup for a particular purpose with only a few extra products.

It's fair to say that the addition of a 3rd party product which isn't supported in recent Plones can be the biggest stumbling block to a full migration. Another issue is a lot of bespoke templates, especially if the site's main template has been customised. This means that a lot of functionality may have to be recreated in a Plone 4 kind of way using new templates. These solutions aren't always expensive although some customers may take the opportunity to rethink the overall design and kill two birds with one stone.

Rarely it does happen that it's not feasible to migrate a whole site, and instead it's best to make a new Plone 4 site and try and move over as much content as possible. At this point Dexterity in Plone 4 is a real bonus - it means we can quickly create new content types to match the old ones and then write a script to convert the data from one to the other.

Sometimes there is some particular content that isn't worth the time taken to reproduce and a manual cut/paste is the best solution. However, to date we have succesfully moved at least 95% of any site content when requested and our customers are enjoying all the benefits of Plone 4.

For more details about migrating to Plone 4 please contact us.