Annette Lewis and Will Gwin: From Zope to Plone: Thinking User-First During Migration

Migrating a site is always a challenging task, but when you have dozens of subsites with specific brand standards and custom user functionality, the challenge becomes mammoth. Six Feet Up worked hand-in-hand with Purdue's College of Engineering to migrate their existing Zope site and its subsites into a new Plone instance running on Plone 5.2 / Python 3. Throughout the migration process, we considered the project scale, timelines, and limiting the impact on end users, all while managing the balance between user needs and best practices. During this presentation, you will learn:

• why it matters to think user-first during migration,
• about creative solutions for translating content and functionality into Plone, and
• how to successfully migrate subsites.

An overview of the project:

• HigherEducation always seems to go a bit slower, certainly with migrations.
• Our previous CMS was built in Zope and was getting extremely old.
• We have been using Python since 2001.
• There were security concerns and modernization issues.

The impact:

• Only 15+ content editors.
• 40+ public facing subsites
• 30,000 total pages.
• 20+ departments and units

Why did we select Plone as the next CMS?

• It is a modern CMS solution
• Python-based, so that fit what we currently have.
• It is built on top of the Zope web framework that we were already using.
• We looked at Drupal, Wordpress, and more, but that would have been a too big undertaking.

This was in 2018.

Laying out the solution. From requirements to action. Who are our users and what do they want? Not just our direct client (Will and his team) but their clients/users.

Challenges during development:

• Purdue University changed its brand look. We had to seamlessly blend subsites into the existing parent site.
• Convert all content types and templates from Zope to Plone.
• Keep sight of the user experience in both environments. Could they use the new environment without too much training, or needing to have too much tech knowledge?

Determine the project essence. Distill the requirements down into broad categories: accessibility, usability, flexibility, security.

What is the path to successful collaboration?

• The absolute best might not be the right answer.
• It's okay to say no to an idea, but you dhouls have an alternative ready.
• Aim for the best, avoid the dangerous, end up somewhere in the middle sometimes.

On to our development goals:

• Do things in a Plone way. Plone uses Zope, but Zope may do some things in a different way than is the best way in Plone.
• So observe best practices.
• Make it intuitive and keep it familiar for the editors.

Solutions at a glance

Migrating site content:

• We wanted to move subsites one by one, as needed.
• Translate existin content to Plone content types
• We could re-import content over existing content non-destructively.

Theming: retrofitting Plone into an existing theme. That is what Diazo was made for, bridging the gap between Plone and the theme, especially since the theme is 'living', with subtle changes coming in often.

Each subsite had a browser view named local.css to change some things. Not really what you want in Plone, but they really needed it, as a way to make subsites or sections look different. So we added an action to edit the local css, inheriting from parent folders.

We created a subsite settings control panel. We used lineage.registry for this. All kinds of customizations can be done based on that, for example add extra text and links in the navigation menu. They used to be able to do this in Zope as well, but that was with various properties, and much more code oriented.

We use Mosaic for flexibility of layout. In Zope we had blocks for layout. Mosaic took this a step further into a nice UI with drag and drop. It gives faster site prototyping and development.

The sandbox: we wanted to have safe spaces for content experimentation. Completely separate from production environment. It is used for new user training and testing. It is quick and easy to reset.

This migration project has been a constant collaboration between the Purdue communications office, Engineering Computer Network, and Plone company Six Feet Up. The content editors feel empowered to make complex changes, without constant oversight from my team.