Any news on the upgrade?

Just curious if the upgrade is coming along. I thought I remember that being targeted for October.

I've stopped holding my breath and for the most part coming to this site at all. Not to sound so negative, but the site has been buggy and painfully slow for well over a year now, and the frustration of waiting forever for blogs and pages to load, or not load at all, is just too taxing on my patience.

I assume the upgrade didn't happen yet? (I hope so, as things are still slow...)

Congrats on the Ploneboard upgrade. I have been following your progress from CMFBoard (as a fellow Plone person) and am really interested in learning about your conversion, progress and lessons learned.

I have over probably 20 or so forums to convert to Ploneboard the biggest having 2100 topics and over 13,000 posts.

From what I can tell, there are still some really big Ploneboard bugs out there and it seems like it is still not up to prime time.

What do you think?

BZ

BZ,

Others can chime in, but so far I'm pleased with Ploneboard. The main issues really  fall into two categories:

Speed: This really is probably not Ploneboard's fault, nor even Plone, but how we have the caches configured (incorrectly). It's much more complicated now, so is taking way too long to configure. We're making some progress, but not enough for me. So we'll plug away.

Anchors: Ploneboard uses anchors to go to specific comments in a conversation (a page). This is a feature, not a bug, but it does have many unwanted consequences, directly affecting the speed of Ploneboard when going to a specific content using an anchor. This problem can be minimized by sorting comments from most recent to last in a conversation, but users fund that unorthodox (it is). The alternative, very slow conversations, I'm sure would elicit even more howls, so we changed our conversations to the reverse sort order. When the Ploneboard architects can come up with a solution, we'll change back.

There are a few other minor problems with Ploneboard, for our use here anyway. These should be easily fixable once we have tuned the site. Other problems that are documented on plone.org do not really affect us.

BTW, the conversion of CMFBoard content to Ploneboard was not a problem at all. This was done in the context of migrating from Plone 2.0.5 to Plone 2.1.4, so we found a few other problems in that transition. But most are solved. Speed is our real remaining issue.

MArshall

Previously BZ wrote:

Congrats on the Ploneboard upgrade. I have been following your progress from CMFBoard (as a fellow Plone person) and am really interested in learning about your conversion, progress and lessons learned.

I have over probably 20 or so forums to convert to Ploneboard the biggest having 2100 topics and over 13,000 posts.

From what I can tell, there are still some really big Ploneboard bugs out there and it seems like it is still not up to prime time.

What do you think?

BZ

Previously BZ wrote:

Congrats on the Ploneboard upgrade. I have been following your progress from CMFBoard (as a fellow Plone person) and am really interested in learning about your conversion, progress and lessons learned.

I have over probably 20 or so forums to convert to Ploneboard the biggest having 2100 topics and over 13,000 posts.

From what I can tell, there are still some really big Ploneboard bugs out there and it seems like it is still not up to prime time.

What do you think?

BZ

A bit of background here. Suresh (nice to "see" you) did all the migration work, getting LiveModern from Plone 2.0.5 to Plone 2.1.4 including migrating all CMFBoard content to Ploneboard. He did a great job, and is continuing to work on tweaking the site. We're currently projecting end-of-year to be finished with everything.

In the meantime if you are interested in his services, he has a website with more details about his services.

Marshall

Previously Suresh V wrote:

Hi BZ..

As Marshall suggested, I will chime in here.

Ploneboard works! It is not as spiffy as CMFBoard and doesn't have all the bells and whistles (yet), but it is well integrated with Plone and supports all essential functionality.

As the developer who helped migrate this site to Plone 2.1 inclusing the forums content, I would say Ploneboard is definitely ready for primetime. Upgrading would also let you use the latest Zope/Plone improvements.

Suresh

I contacted Suresh and we are talking about some migration stuff.

Are you working with group on getting some Ploneboard improvements? It seems like the bugs listed for 1.1 are going nowhere and the guys behind it are busy with Plone 3.0.

BZ

BZ,

Suresh is working on some Ploneboard improvements that are specific to this site which, if others find them compelling, may be integrated into future versions of Ploneboard. Please track the svn for those improvements.

Marshall

Previously BZ wrote:

I contacted Suresh and we are talking about some migration stuff.

Are you working with group on getting some Ploneboard improvements? It seems like the bugs listed for 1.1 are going nowhere and the guys behind it are busy with Plone 3.0.

BZ

BZ,

Being modernists, we love being on the bleeding edge.

We have not found any undocumented bugs in Ploneboard itself. It's very stable software for a 1.0 release (and quite usable as well!). There are some documented bugs in the Ploneboard issue tracker, but we've either not experienced them or have made slight modifications to page templates to "hide" the bugs, otherwise know as performance issues. The biggest one of these is how Ploneboard finds anchored comments. What we've done is reverse sorted the conversations, which is not orthodox. I hope we can revert to a stock template soon.

The performance issues, both for Plone and Ploneboard, are related not to the software, but to our implementation of it on a server that is quite simply trying to do too much. We will solve this soon as I am ordering another server today. I hope most of the performance issues will be resolved in a week or so, as the hardware required to handle this kind of site does not come cheap!

Marshall

Previously BZ wrote:

Thanks for the update.

So far, this is the biggest implementation of Ploneboard I can find and the bugs and performance issues are certainly giving me pause about using it for my high traffic websites.

Do you think some of the problems you have been having are Ploneboard related? (speed, etc)

BZ

Thanks for the response (here and on the mailing list)

I have been migrating a lot of sites (over 10 now) from Zope/CMF to Plone and one of the things holding me back is that my bigger sites use ZUBB and I need a replacement. 

I have been playing with Ploneboard for months, put it on a few small websites and it seems to be bahaving pretty well.

Just today, using a little copy and paste magic I built a ploneboard with over 4,000 comments and 2,000 threads and it seems to be doing ok. I will be doing more benchmarking later.

Did you benchmark Ploneboard during your transition?

BZ

Jake,

While it's OK to pose the question here, you know better than to expect an answer. Really, carry this discussion to the Plone users list.

Marshall

Previously BZ wrote:

Thanks for the response (here and on the mailing list)

I have been migrating a lot of sites (over 10 now) from Zope/CMF to Plone and one of the things holding me back is that my bigger sites use ZUBB and I need a replacement. 

I have been playing with Ploneboard for months, put it on a few small websites and it seems to be bahaving pretty well.

Just today, using a little copy and paste magic I built a ploneboard with over 4,000 comments and 2,000 threads and it seems to be doing ok. I will be doing more benchmarking later.

Did you benchmark Ploneboard during your transition?

BZ

Just to let you know that progress on this site is being made:

• We have allowed authors to edit their own posts. For those of you that have discovered this functionality, I'm sure you appreciate it like I do
• We've also introduced the "insert image" button in the kupu tool bar for forum posts (it's standard on all other content). This will make it easier for you to add images to the site, or reference images that you've already added in your home folder (the preferred method). Of course, if you are using Safari, this will not make a difference to you until Safari is upgraded this spring. We've also confirmed reports that it is not working quite right on IE7 (the "insert image" button is there, but does not produce the desired result when you click on it), and working on it.
• The most recently active conversations are now correctly listed at the top of each forum view (listing all conversations in that forum). I'm sure this will make it easier for you to track your favorite conversations.

More progress:

• We've fixed the bug in kupu (the inline editor) that made it very hard for Windows users to insert images (see second issue in previous post).
• We've reverted the sort order of all conversations to first comment first, rather than last comment first. This conforms to other forum software sort orders, so it should be easier to use the forums if you are used to using another forum. We are concerned about the speed impact on the site, as the old sort order was intended to minimize CPU usage when going to a particular comment in a conversation. We're not seeing any big hit so far, but trust that you will let us know if there is one.

adding comment to see where we land up

That appears to work.

Just to let you know what we are testing (and it all works now):

In order to conform to standards that exist in most other forum products, all comments in a conversation are now listed in chronological order, meaning that when you click on a conversation link in a forum, you are taken to the initial comment in the conversation. Then you can follow the conversation from the beginning.

If you want to go to the most recent comment, because you've been following the conversation, simply click on the link in the "most recent conversation" column. (Resorting of columns by clicking on column headers still does not work, but we are aware of that minor bug.)

This functionality works the same for a listing of all conversations in a forum, as well as in the recent comments page. It's a bit more processor intensive to make this all work, but the performance hit is not significant. We'll see how it holds up over time.

Thanks to all for the great feedback since we upgraded the software and server.

Marshall

That feature is very processor intensive, but I'll look into if it might be possible to revive with the new server.

Marshall

Do you think we are ready to advertise the "Subscribe" feature to our users? You should see a mail alert about this.

-- Suresh

For those of you that are using our forums a lot this week, you've probably noticed a new link at the bottom left of each conversation page when you are logged in. It's the back-by-popular-demand Subscribe/Unsubscribe function.

When you subscribe to a conversation by clicking on the link, an email will be sent to the address in your preferences notifying you that a comment has been added to your subscribed conversation. You can unsubscribe at any time (when you are logged in).

We will make the author of the initial comment in a conversation automatically subscribed, but only for comments going forward. We're also looking into an option for you to subscribe/unsubscribe to all conversations in a forum (with, of course, the option to unsubscribe from any particular conversation).

It was a long slog, but that pretty much completes the original specification list for our new forum software.

Marshall

It's the latter. The insertion point for the cursor is not automatically put in before the quote, and thus sometimes a replier will add their comment after the quote making it all a quote (if that makes sense). We'll look into it, though I don't think the solution is easy.

Marshall

Previously Marshall Mayer wrote:

It's the latter. The insertion point for the cursor is not automatically put in before the quote, and thus sometimes a replier will add their comment after the quote making it all a quote (if that makes sense). We'll look into it, though I don't think the solution is easy.

You should the "shift left" button on the toolbar to create space where you want to and then put your text there. This is the button to the immediate right of the bulleted list button.

Suresh

Subscribed.

The latest improvement to the forums is that you can now subscribe to a forum and receive notifications to all new comments in any conversation in that forum. the Subscribe link is at the bottom of the forum page which lists all of the conversations.

Of course, if you want to unsubscribe from all of the conversations, you can do that as well. It's a global command, so any conversations in the forum that you want to remain subscribed to will be affected.

Also note that when you start a conversation you are automatically subscribed to it. If you add a comment, you will still need to subscribe to the conversation to be notified of any responses

Marshall

Sounds great.

I am looking to try and get some sponsorship of Ploneboard for bug fixes, scalability and new features. Is that something you would be interested in?

BZ,

Of course we'd be interested in this, especially as improvements that Suresh makes for us can be contributed to the Ploneboard code base for all to benefit from.

Marshall

Previously BZ wrote:

I am looking to try and get some sponsorship of Ploneboard for bug fixes, scalability and new features. Is that something you would be interested in?