Whoha, this past week went by fast... the reason I haven't been posting anything was that I've been in the process of migrating this site from Plone 2.0.5 to the recently released 2.1rc3. As it turned out, migrating the content wasn't yet quite as straightforward - mainly because I've been using the deprecated CMFPhoto(Album) Product - so once I had pulled that feat off on my local development machine I was reluctant to add any more content on the production host, since it would mean to migrate again.

So why a whole week? Well, the actual migration took only one evening. Big props to the Plone development team - it went really smooth. The trick to convert my CMFPhoto-based content was to download it via WevDAV, delete it in the ZODB, create a regular folder with the same name and re-upload the images via WebDAV - voila!

Of course, my previous skin with all of its evil, dirty hacks to get that tab-based navigation working broke with the new (and noticably cleaner!) implementation of Plone2.1.

And since I'd chose a clean, fresh start over messing further with something that's already messy I decided to give this site (yet) another new look. (The rational justification being, of course, that as a Plone developer I need to get some hands-on experience with the new layout of Plone 2.1...)

After spending an evening with Photoshop and a couple of beers I then used my free time during the past few evenings to implement the design using the new default Plone templates - and from a developer perspective I must say, that Plone has really gotten a great deal cleaner and neater under the hood - I'm really looking forward to making my next site!

One neat new feature of Plone 2.1 you really need to check out: go ahead, start typing something into the search field (located in the upper right corner) and give it a second or two: you'll see the search results pop up live as you type (similar to Mac OS X Tiger's spotlight) - cool, huh?

While there's a) still lots for me to discover in Plone 2.1 and b) lots of cleaning up to be done with the new skin for this site I just didn't want to wait any longer with releasing the upgrade - so here it is, warts and all ;)