News

Six Feet Up is pleased to announce it has completed a highly complex Plone migration project for the renowned Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS).

When SEAS turned to Six Feet Up for help, their website was running the open source Content Management System (CMS) Plone 3.1.5.1 and had performance issues. Developers therefore recommended and implemented a triple migration: first moving the site to Plone 3.1.7, then to Plone 3.3.5, and finally to Plone 4.1.

As the SEAS site was using a large number of products, Six Feet Up started by evaluating each module's compatibility with the latest version of Plone, and provided recommendations when an add-on just didn't have a newer equivalent.

SEAS also featured a complicated legacy architecture with dozens of sub-sites managed via a custom product. The Six Feet Up developers reverse-engineered the add-on to fix various issues that came up during the migration efforts. They also adapted elements of the template to the newer version of the Plone CMS.

As the SEAS architecture was powered by multiple load-balanced servers, Six Feet Up took action and adjusted the blobstorage feature that comes bundled with Plone 4 to make sure the site could efficiently serve large files.

"A tight collaboration between the two teams was critical in the outcome of this complex project," stated Six Feet Up CEO Gabrielle Hendryx-Parker. "We are very thankful to the SEAS team for the outstanding support they provided our development team throughout this effort."

The newer version of the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) site is now up and boasting much improved performances.