As mentioned earlier on this blog, I have converted this site from Plone to Django.

The conversion included migrating most of the data from the Plone instance’s ZODB (Zope Object Database) into Django’s ORM.

The hard part of that process is to get the data out of ZODB as the format depends completely on which Plone products you have been using. You need to check the schema for each product for which you want to extract data to get the field names, and you need to write code for extracting the data from each type of content type and add a new object in Django’s ORM, translating data from one format to another in some cases.

In my case, I wrote a script that takes care of:

• Document and Folder objects from Plone’s standard contenttypes.

• Blog entries in a Quills blog.

The script will traverse all Document, Folder and Blog entries and extract their data, adding instances of Django models from two custom Django products I have written.

A second script will then read the data from Django’s database and modify the URLs in <img> tags, downloading the images from the Plone site via HTTP to a directory which will be configured as MEDIA_ROOT in Django. The script does the same for <a> tags that refer to images, .tar.gz files, etc. that also were stored in the ZODB of the Plone instance.

Each site that wants to do a conversion from Plone to Django will have to write their own script, as the set of products used in the Plone instance is site-specific, and the set of applications used in Django is also site-specific. However, I have made my conversion scripts available via subversion in the hope that they can serve as an example.

To access the scripts, either check them out with your subversion client. Example:

git clone git://github.com/forsberg/misctools.git

The scripts are in the plone2django_migration subdirectory.

You can also browse them here: