After a long time, I am restarting this blog.

I am now working on Django, AngularJS. But my love for Plone is not lost. Working on ZDesign has been a passion. Still working on  it as part time personal project.

When I migrated the code of ZDesign from Plone 2.5 to Plone 3, I have made a lot of mistakes and assumptions. Due to that, when I migrated to Plone 4, the maintenance has beeen a hell. Now, after I learnt from my mistakes, these are the things I am doing.

• Comment all the function and method calls
• Try to use as much of framework utility rather than custom code
• If custom code is written then add lot of documentation and comments about why that decision was taken to deviate from the framework

Some of the problems I faced were

• Had written custom Popups for ATReferenceBrowser widget. That does not work in Plone 4
• Had written multiple content types to use multi page schema where the next page was dependent on previous Input. Alas that has also become a pain to maintain
• Previous version of Plone did not have native support for JQuery. So had added lot of custom javascript. Now they are breaking. 
• Commenting system has changed a lot and have to use plone.app.discussion for the same now.
• Plone2Pdf not working :(

Things I did well when migrating from Plone 2.5 to Plone 3 and Plone 4 were

• Used the system's plone.app.menu to create custom menu
• Have hooked in signals
• Usage of buildout
• Specifying the required packages in settings.py
• Now, I have found a great library WKHTML2PDF. I have started using collective.sendaspdf for PDF generation. Still working on nitty gritties.
• Managed to add comments to folder type content type
• Usage of brains instead of waking up of object (Helped a lot in speeding things up)
• Usage of isotope for searching and listing of the content types (My personal victory!!!)

Still work in progress

• Using custom Refernce Pop Up with Images
• Cleaning up of Pages when we generate as PDF
• Making PDF available for all the content types
• Giving Quick add Option for some cards in Library
• Listing of the content types based on some search criteria through AJAX (helpful in color cards)

Looking forward to rework the whole system in Plone 5. Will I try to migrate code from Plone 4 to 5 or start from scratch is the descision I have to make.