Importing an old Plone 3.3 site as second site in my Plone 4.1

Question

I'm running a Plone 4.1 site, and since we have a second site that has been down for a while, and which was built over Plone 3.3, we'd like to import that site as well into our Plone 4.1. I have already created a separate mount point, but copying the old Data.fs file into the new mount point didn't really work. What I'd like to do is: grab the Data.fs from the old plone install, move it to a separate mount point (it will be placed in a subfolder now, it was just under var/filestorage before), and port it to v.4.1 in some way.

I've searched various tutorials but didn't find any relevant hint on how to solve this need, anybody could give me some pointers? thanks!

Answer 1

Thanks a lot Giacomo, i was able to move further through the approach you suggested. So what I've done was:

1. create a vanilla test instance matching the target version (4.1)
2. copy Data.fs and blobstorage folder from the old site to my test instance. (In the meantime I realised the old site was a 4.0, not a 3.3, hence I moved also the whole blobstorage folder, otherwise further export wouldn't have worked).
3. startup my test instance, and upgrade the storage through the "Upgrade" button on plone startup page
4. from ZMI, export my site to a zexp file
5. upload the zexp file into zinstance/var/instance/import on the target platform
6. enter the ZMI of the target platform, select the folder that i mapped to the mount point for my second site, and there import the zexp file

This last step of importing the zexp fails with the following error:

Error Type: TypeError
Error Value: Blobs are not supported
Troubleshooting Suggestions
    The URL may be incorrect.
    The parameters passed to this resource may be incorrect.
    A resource that this resource relies on may be encountering an error.

Which in the logs corresponds to:

2011-10-05T12:49:27 ERROR Zope.SiteErrorLog 1317811767.860.405425857164    http://localhost:8080/mysecondsite/manage_importObject
Traceback (innermost last):
  Module ZPublisher.Publish, line 126, in publish
  Module ZPublisher.mapply, line 77, in mapply
  Module ZPublisher.Publish, line 46, in call_object
  Module OFS.ObjectManager, line 619, in manage_importObject
  Module OFS.ObjectManager, line 637, in _importObjectFromFile
  Module ZODB.ExportImport, line 92, in importFile
  Module transaction._transaction, line 260, in savepoint
  Module transaction._transaction, line 257, in savepoint
  Module transaction._transaction, line 690, in __init__
  Module ZODB.Connection, line 1123, in savepoint
  Module ZODB.Connection, line 587, in _commit
  Module ZODB.ExportImport, line 181, in _importDuringCommit
  Module ZODB.Connection, line 1302, in storeBlob
  Module ZODB.Connection, line 1331, in _getBlobPath
  Module ZODB.Connection, line 1344, in temporaryDirectory
  Module ZODB.blob, line 686, in temporaryDirectory
  Module ZODB.blob, line 492, in temp_dir
TypeError: Blobs are not supported

Any clue of how to solve this one? Thanks! silvio

Answer 2

I'd suggest to:

1. create a clean plone4 separated environment.
2. copy the old data.fs to the new env
3. follow the section "Updating a custom Plone 3 buildout for Plone 4" from the Plone Upgrade Guide
4. export your upgraded site and import it in your first environment