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parse2plone

(Formerly charm, Formerly mr.importer, formerly parse2plone.)

Import static websites on the file system into Plone via:

$ bin/plone run bin/parse2plone /path/to/files

Warning

This is more of a "toy project" than a "real data migrator". For any serious Plone migrations, you may want to consider a collective.transmogrifier-based tool e.g. mr.migrator. That is not to say you will not find parse2plone useful as a sample migration script, just that you should not expect it to scale to meet any complex needs; whereas that is exactly what transmogrifier-based tools are designed to do.

Introduction

parse2plone is a Buildout recipe that creates a script for you to get content from static websites on the file system into Plone.

Note

This is a Buildout recipe for use with Plone; by itself it does nothing. If you don't know what Plone is, please see: http://plone.org. If you don't know what Buildout is, please see: http://www.buildout.org/.

parse2plone relies on the "run" argument of scripts created by plone.recipe.zope2instance to mount and modify the Plone database.

Getting started

• A Plone site object must exist in the Zope2 instance database. By default, parse2plone assumes the site object is named "Plone".
• A user must exist in the Zope2 instance database (or Plone site). By default, parse2plone assumes the user is named "admin".

Note

This recipe creates a script that is not intended to be run directly. Due to technical limitations, the author was not able to implement a user friendly error message. So if you run bin/parse2plone directly you will see this:

$ bin/parse2plone

Traceback (most recent call last):

File "bin/parse2plone", line 117, in <module>

parse2plone.main(app=app)

NameError: name 'app' is not defined

To avoid this, run the script as intended:

$ bin/plone run bin/parse2plone /path/to/files

See the execution section below for more information.

Installation

You can install parse2plone by editing your buildout.cfg file like so:

[buildout]
...
parts =
    ...
    parse2plone

[parse2plone]
recipe = parse2plone

Now run bin/buildout as usual.

Execution

Now you can run parse2plone like this:

$ bin/plone run bin/parse2plone /path/to/files

Note

In the example above and examples below, bin/plone refers to a Zope 2 instance script created by plone.recipe.zope2instance.

Your bin/plone script may be called bin/instance or bin/client, etc. instead.

Example

If you have a site in /var/www/html that contains the following:

/var/www/html/index.html
/var/www/html/about/index.html

You should run:

$ bin/plone run bin/parse2plone /var/www/html

And the following will be created:

• http://localhost:8080/Plone/index.html
• http://localhost:8080/Plone/about/index.html

Troubleshooting

Here are some trouble-shooting comments/tips.

Compiling lxml

parse2plone requires lxml which in turn requires libxml2 and libxslt. If you do not have lxml installed "globally" (i.e. in your system Python's site-packages directory) then Buildout will try to install it for you. At this point lxml will look for the libxml2/libxslt2 development libraries to build against, and if you don't have them installed on your system already your mileage may vary (i.e. Buildout will fail).

Database access

Before running parse2plone, you must either stop your Plone site or use ZEO. Otherwise parse2plone will not be able to access the database.

Contact

Questions/comments/concerns? Please e-mail: aclark@aclark.net.

Credits

Development sponsored by Radio Free Asia