Lost in migration? A flexible approach to content migration in Plone.

Our tool allows developers to export content from Archetypes to Dexterity. The distinguishing feature of the migration tool is that it does not necessitate migration of the entire database. Individual content types or individual folders may be exported instead. While the standard migration procedure with plone.app.contenttypes theoretically works well on a Vanilla Plone site, real-life projects are usually tricky because they involve dealing with extended Plone content types or even self-made content types. Our migration tool includes a utility to export any Archetypes content object to Dexterity while maintaining its default views, local roles and other settings. We will include in our talk sample migrations to demonstrate some of the tool’s features. In combination with plone.app.transmogrifier we will show how the migration tool exports an entire site as well as specific content types like news items. In our experience the migration tool is far more versatile and powerful than standard Plone migration paths, and we believe the tool could be interesting for use in a wide range of migration projects. We will publish the migration tool as open source code prior to the Plone conference.