Thanks to Reinouts recent work on the Quills/trunk I was able to migrate tomster.org’s blog instance from the 0.9 branch to trunk - and while I was at it, I updated the entire site from Plone 2.1.2 to 2.5.

As Reinout says himself — there’s really not much to report, as everything went rather smoothly. For me personally, however, this allround positive experience came just at the right time, as I have been wrestling with some nasty low-level Archetypes issues for the past several days — with increasing amounts of frustration. This made me realize, that usually when I have my gripes with Plone it’s connected with Zope2 or Archetypes but hardly ever with Plone itself — go figure!

Having migrated my own blog to Quills/trunk also finally gave me ample motivation to migrate some fixes that I’ve applied to the 0.9 branch to it. Most notably,

• MetaWeblogAPI works (this post was created with MarsEdit)
• The Comments management screen has been converted to use a catalog query and thus received a significant speedup
• You can now filter comments by author, subject and body text — very useful for weeding out spam bots!
• Using the portal_catalog also finally made it possible to sort comments by creation date (previously they had been sorted by the date of the post they belonged to, which meant that new spam to old posts was hard to spot)
• fatsyndication now honours portal_syndication’s getMaxItem property (default is 15)
• fixed the rss.xml template of basesyndication to validate and avoid continued embarressment on Planet Plone ;-) (thanks Ree!)
  

The most fun feature that the trunk offers (thanks to Tim) is that it’s ditched its own WeblogTopic content type in favour of using Plone’s own keywords — this makes it significantly easier to tag entries and allows for a nifty tag-cloud portlet.

It’s really nice to see that development of Quills has gained momentum again and that the trunk is now in a usable shape.