Oooh, don't you just love it, when stuff works as planned? After my recent crash I (finally!) got appropriately prudent and patient: I'm talking about updating my zope/plone installation to their current versions. As such an operation may easily wipe out all the data and in consequence (at best) cause long downtimes for all sites hosted by that zope instance, I decided to go for a twofold process. First a dirty trial-and-error attempt on a test machine. And then, preferably after a good nights sleep, an orchestrated maneuver on the production machine.

What can I say? It worked like a charm! After fiddling endlessly yesterday I today pulled the same operation in the machine that is hosting this blog and other zope stuff. A lot of that time was dedicated to searching for the necessary packages - there still seems to be no central repository for everything needed to install and run a current version of plone...

Well, using Safari's history function and my trusted XMLEditor, I assembled a spanking new chapter of the FreeBSD Cookbook on how to install plone2 and zope 2.7 on FreeBSD. UNIX being what it is, Linux users should find it helpful, too, I guess. Especially because of the table of required packages including direct download links for their current versions. I hope to maintain this table for the next weeks (until plone2 final is released, I guess...) Any help in that would be greatly appreciated!

In the course of all of this, I have transferred multiple instances of plone sites back and forth between two machines. Aside from some minor hitches (member roles lost) it all went well and I now have gained good confidence in my webdata's security... I simply left the old instance running all along, so that the actual switch took less than 10 seconds.

As a side-effect, performance seems to be noticably up, especially image-resizing.