If you can get it back into version 2.5 then the data belongs to plone, otherwise it never belonged to plone in the first place..

I'm still undecided and a bit lost about how i'm going to get www.dfrskatezine.com upgraded from 2.1 to plone 2.5

To recap:-

• I can't really upgrade it in situ (although could be persuaded to try it if people think this is the best bet)
• portal zexp import didn't work for me
• smaller zexp imports left me with broken stuff.
• it is on a shared instance so the data.fs file is too big to move realistically (once again, still an option if encouraged)

so...I've started creating some zpts that I can use to dump content as xml files (e.g. all_articles.xml, containing title, content, url and any other data I need to move - kind of RSS on acid). Not quite XMLforest, but I haven't got my head round that yet as I live in the skin layer mostly. The masterplan is to then use some python foo magic to populate a fresh 2.5.most_recent_stable site from this XML.

Obviously I need to handle the images and other files seperately - so far I have used a skin script to generate a file containing wget statements for each visible/published image on the site and download the images with a mirrored folder structure, along with an accompanying xml file with the captions, descriptions and paths. I intend to rebuild my products from scratch (pop my zope 3 cherry even?) so I don't necessarily need my existing products to be 2.5 compatible.

Think i'm going about this the wrong way? Please let me know! Please also bear in mind that while I am a keen student, I am mostly a GUI guy (+ basic archetypes development), and am easily confused by your crazy python talk, and have been made weak by your excellent installers, to the point that I haven't got a clue how you would go about installing or upgrading zope if it requires me to do anything more than click buttons ;-)