Upgrade a custom add-on to Plone 5.0

This chapter discusses how to upgrade a custom add-on to Plone 5.0.

Archetypes

If your add-on depends on Archetypes, you will need some parts of Products.ATContentTypes. Those parts will be declared by the profile "Archetypes-tools without content types". It must be added to your profiles/default/metadata.xml that way:

<dependencies>
    <dependency>profile-Products.ATContentTypes:base</dependency>
    ...
</dependencies>

JS/CSS bundle

Plone 5 does not use portal_css and portal_javascript anymore. The add-on resources will have to be provided into a bundle.

Add a file named registry.xml in your profile, containing:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<registry>

  <records prefix="plone.bundles/ouraddon"
            interface='Products.CMFPlone.interfaces.IBundleRegistry'>
    <value key="enabled">True</value>
    <value key="jscompilation">++resource++mycustom.js</value>
    <value key="csscompilation">++resource++mycustom.css</value>

    <value key="last_compilation">2019-11-26 00:00:00</value>
    <value key="compile">False</value>
    <value key="depends">plone</value>
  </records>

</registry>

Note

This example assumes our JavaScript and CSS are provided as browser resources, but if they are in our old skins folder, that would work too:

<value key="csscompilation">portal_skins/MyAddon/mycustom.css</value>

CSRF protection

Plone 5 provides a CSRF protection mechanism. This mechanism is integrated into the different Plone frameworks. If your add-on only uses default Dexterity or Archetypes features, you are safe.

But any custom redirection or form submission will have to include a token provided by plone.protect.

• In a template:

  <span tal:replace="structure context/@@authenticator/authenticator"/>
  

• In a JavaScript:

  authenticator = context.restrictedTraverse("@@authenticator")
  url = url + "?_authenticator="  + authenticator.token()
  state.set(..., next_action='redirect_to:string:%s' % url)
  

• In a method:

  from plone.protect.utils import addTokenToUrl
  url = addTokenToUrl(url)
  

plone.app.stagingbehavior

plone.app.stagingbehavior was used to enable versioning functionality for Dexterity-based content types. It allowed you to perform the checkout and checkin operations to work on a copy of your original content on Plone 4.

The version of plone.app.iterate used in Plone 5 implements this already, making that package obsolete.

You should remove any hard dependency on plone.app.stagingbehavior from your add-on to avoid issues.

See https://github.com/collective/collective.cover/pull/577/files for an example of how to achieve that.

Content type icons

A major breaking change from Plone 4.x to Plone 5 is how content type icons are handled. See Content Type Icons for details.