Websites Report September 2008

Computerbank's Main Website

Upgrading to Plone 3.1.4.

Our Plone 2.5.5. is going well but our Silva site has problems (see below for details). Kylie and I decided it was a good time to plan an amalgamation of the content from our two sites to Plone 3.1.4.

Plone 3 was released in September last year.

New functionality in the Plone 3 will let volunteers add and edit content in designated areas. The site can have some content that can just be seen by logged in volunteers - such as rosters, and other content just seen by committee members. The site's navigation will easily allow the logical addition of the content currently on the documentation site.

Here's a list of the new features in Plone 3

New Issue Tracker

In moving we will not have an issue tracker on the new site.

Our current issue tracker comes inside the wiki product in Plone. There is no stable version of an issue tracker for Plone 3 as yet. I much prefer to move our issue tracker to Google Code where further upgrade issues will be handled by Google. We qualify to use space on Google code because we are a not for profit and our code is open source.

This is a good time to move because we have recently moved to a new distro. The current tracker also covers the websites, the Lan and the building. Our emerging Django database already uses Google Code for its issues.

Here's is a link to the Issue Tracker on Google Code.
Computerbank's Issue Tracker

In order to use the Issue Tracker people must have a gmail account. For people without a gmail account we have a generic gmail account we can let you use.

How many issues do we want to copy across to the new issue tracker?

Here's a link to the current Issue Tracker Computerbank's current Issue Tracker

Upgrade Details
Following on from Barry's Plone 3 tests on a test box I have been transferring Computerbank's content to Plone 3. Because of the structure of our current Plone site the content has been upgraded to Plone 3 but the old layout will not upgrade well. In some tests folders were behaving as documents and there seemed to be only clunky workarounds to add new content. To future proof the site the upgraded content is being cut and pasted into a new layout in a fresh Plone 3 instance.

I have now completed offline upgrades for the other Plone sites on my hosted instance.

Plone 2.5.5. and Plone 3.1.4 have difference versions of some of the same dependancies. So running both versions of Plone on my hosted space is not something I am about to try. When Computerbank's plone is upgraded on the test box I will be able to move all the sites up to Plone 3.1.4. on the hosted instance.

I expect to move Computerbank's Plone before all the content from Silva have been updated and moved across because this process could take a while.

The good news is that whilst this work is in progress the old Silva documentation site (this site) will still be viewable.

Computerbank's Documentation site
Silva version 1.4.1b
This website has been ticking along without a major problem since it was upgraded way back in 2004.

There is a relatively new bug, when authorised users try to edit using Firefox 3 the edited page disappears. There are further problems starting to emerge editing with other web browsers as well. So unfortunately it is time to leave Silve and move across to Plone. We could ask our hosts to upgrade Silva but Kylie and I think it's time to amalgamate the Plone and Silva content and just have one website for Computerbank. It means only one website to train people on and one website to upgrade etc.

Documentation
Jan has started reorganising the content from both web sites.

A report Barry carried out earlier shows that a lot of content on the Silva site is out of date. In integrating the material some items will be abandoned and others bought up to date.

~ Report compiled by Jan