Question

I need to upgrade an old system based on Zope, I need to be able to export the data to something like SQL Server…does anyone know of a way I can open the Zope DB in .NET or directly export it to SQL Server?

Thanks,
Kieron

Answer 1

I am a Plone web developer, and Jason Coombs is correct. The ZODB is an Object Data Base, and contains python objects. These objects can be python code, data, meta-data, etc and are stored in a hierarchy. This is very different from the world of SQL tables and stored procedures. (The growing NoSQL movement, shows that Zope is not the only one doing this.) Additionally, since these are complex python objects you really want to be working on the ZODB with the version of python it was created with, or make sure that you can do a proper migration. I don’t think that you will be able to do this with IronPython.

Without knowing what you are trying to get out of the ZODB, it is hard to give specific advice. As Jason suggested, trying WebDAV/FTP access to the ZODB might be all that you need. This allows to pull out the basic content of pages, or image files, but you may loose much of the more complex data (for example an event page may not have all of its datetime data included) and you will loose much of of the meta-data.

Here is how someone migrated from Plone to Word press:

http://www.len.ro/2008/10/plone-to-wordpress-migration/

There are a number of articles on migrating from one Plone version to another. Some of this information maybe useful to you. stackoverflow is not allowing me to post more links but search for:

“when the plone migration fails doing content migration only”

“Plone Product ContentMigration”