Upgrading plone 2.1.2 to 2.5¶

I upgraded vanrees.org to plone 2.5 yesterday. To be honest, that's almost not newsworthy: it went smoothly.

Behind the scenes, there's a lot of improvements to plone. Much more zope 3 goodness. But that's behind the scenes and the few parts that needed modifying from 2.1.2 were migrated without a hitch.

On the front end, I had to redo some portlets but would have really had to do that for 2.1 already. Moving from the h5 to the dd style of portlets. I took the chance to play with DIY plone style, especially using Limi's tutorial for it. So I took the liberty of making the design much simpler.

• No more navtree, no more portlets on the left. Just for some management tasks, normal viewers should get just the contents.
• A prominent breadcrumb at the top as the main navigation mode. I get most of my viewers from google anyway, directly to the individual pages. So spending lots of screen real estate to navigation elements isn't that good an investment.
• Some more attention (more to come) to the portlets on the right. I've kept the random image portlet, that's a handy pointer at one of the important parts of my site. I added a portlet with the last weblog items so point to the weblog area from every page. That left the personal and research part: I settled for a last-modified-items portlet for both of them. Especially the research part doesn't see too much changes, so I'll probably have to settle for something different.
• I need to re-add the google adsense advertisements on some pages. Not that they bring in lots of money, but I like it anyway as it is nice to experiment with. And I get the impression that it encourages google to scan my pages. Also the clustrmap portlet with the world map + viewers per location needs to return. Perhaps in the footer.

Anyway, good to get current with plone and especially good to see the migration going so smoothly. I was helped in this by instancemanager's capability to migrate plone which made the testing process a breeze.