#14: CMFBoard migration utility

Contents

by Jon Stahl — last modified Jun 11, 2006 12:22 AM

Develop a migration tool for converting a CMFBoard forum into Ploneboard.

Proposed by: Jon Stahl, ONE/Northwest
Seconded by: Marshall Mayer, LiveModern.com
Proposal type: Administrative functions
State: deferred

Motivation

We believe that a core "early adopter" audience for Ploneboard will consist of frustrated users of CMFBoard. (Marshall is one!) Therefore we believe that a utility to migrate CMFBoard instances to Ploneboard will greatly speed rapid adoption of Ploneboard among the current community of Plone forum users.

Assumptions

We recognize that this is a non-trivial project that will depend in part on other Ploneboard enhancements proposed elsewhere.

It will require considerable additional specification work at a later date.

Livemodern.com is definitely willing to provide some funds to develop such a module. We suspect there are a number of other potential sponsors out there among the current community of CMFBoard users.

We do not believe this tool has to be part of the core Ploneboard install - it would definitely be fine to have it as a separate product.

Proposal

Build a migration tool.

Comments (5)

Beren Erchamion Oct 26, 2005 12:04 PM

I agree with your statement that a migration utility would spur more use of PloneBoard. This is especially true now becuase I don't think that CMFBoard supports Plone 2.1 - well at least I can't get it to work so I'm looking for alternatives.

beren

Larry J. Prikockis Nov 03, 2005 07:52 PM

ditto from another frustrated CMFBoard user (or rather, admin). I don't know how much I'd be able to contribute in terms of code, but I'm certainly willing to help out with testing/refining any migration tools. I've got an unmanageable pile of CMFBoard forums that need to get moved to a Plone 2.1 site somehow.

Beren Erchamion Nov 12, 2005 10:21 PM

Well it looks like CMF Board is toast. The site has been down for a few weeks. Anyone have the inside good on this?

In import/conversion for PloneBoard definitely looks like something that would be very cool now :-) I'm not a super python developer guy, but I can hack away and I can help test things. I would think a discussion board tool in teh plone space would be pretty heavily used. I'm a little surprised that there isn't a little more action going on.

beren erchamion

Larry J. Prikockis Nov 30, 2005 08:51 PM

I just saw yet another message on the Plone users list about someone having troubles with CMFBoard, and another person warning him of the issues with that product. Clearly, there's at least a subset of Plone users out there who want or need a discussion forum, ended up with CMFBoard, and are now a bit stuck.

I don't have the skills to write a migration tool, but as I mentioned earlier, would be happy to be a guinnea pig in any testing effort of such a tool.

Surely someone out there has both the desire and the skill to help all of us poor CMFBoard refugees? :-)

Tannic Jan 11, 2006 08:10 PM

Would love to see this as well as it would help lay the foundation of other migration scripts from other older zope forum products.

BZ