A case study of medium-scale CMF-wise copy and paste to merge and move knotes weblogs - it just works!

20-March-2006

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On Thursday we did a thorough re-organising of the weblogs in the NGRF site. This included merging three weblogs into one, and the moving of folders-full of weblogs from one site location to another. We found and fixed two minor issues; otherwise it just works!

One of the big advantages of developing knotes as a product within Plone / Content-Management Framework (CMF) / Zope is that it enables very powerful site-admin actions, including implementations of the copy and paste metaphors extended over large chunks of content. It turned out to be quite a lot of work ensuring that the metaphor would be sustained for objects and transactions as complicated as knotes requires, but we've done and tested that work as we went along.

In the National Guidance Research Forum (NGRF), we have been using knotes in anger for over a year now. In the process of exploring the uses that site managers and end-users can make of weblogging and discussion, there was a proliferation of weblogs over time (one of the other "advantages" of CMF is that it is very very simple for users to create new weblogs - maybe too simple :o).

In advance of a major symposium Friday, and following on from the big improvements we've recently made to usability, we were asked to rapidly re-organise the main weblogs in the NGRF. See the NGRF group discussions area for the end-result: there are now just 3 weblogs in the main public area. We moved a number of blogs and a few indexFolders full of blogs (and nested folders full of blogs, etc), and merged three blogs into one. All of this "just worked" using copy and paste TTP (through-the-Plone interface). We encountered and repaired two small issues.

This involved hundreds of blog entry and discussion objects, and worked very smoothly and quickly. We're not sure what would happen if tens of thousands were involved, but even at that scale it should "just work".


Mike Malloch; 20-March-2006 11:37:14; forum (0) help

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1 Import / export .zexp a knotes weblog across portals

Further to our report that largish-scale plone-wise copying and pasting worked for knotes weblog content, we've just succceeded in exporting a knotes weblog from one Plone portal and importing it into another.
favicon for the site posting this trackback KNotations, 2006-03-25 06:58:08.34

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