AttributeError: ‘NoneType’ object has no attribute ‘items’: Can’t upgrade Plone 3 to 4.x

// under 4.1 plone plone 4 traceback upgrade

You may have seen an error like the one below when you’ve gone to upgrade your Plone site to something in the Plone 4.x series from Plone 3:

2011-09-14 08:43:32 ERROR plone.app.upgrade Upgrade aborted. Error:
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/home/david/.buildout/eggs/Products.CMFPlone-4.1-py2.6.egg/Products/CMFPlone/MigrationTool.py", line 175, in upgrade
    step['step'].doStep(setup)
  File "/home/david/.buildout/eggs/Products.GenericSetup-1.6.3-py2.6.egg/Products/GenericSetup/upgrade.py", line 142, in doStep
    self.handler(tool)
  File "/home/david/.buildout/eggs/plone.app.upgrade-1.1-py2.6.egg/plone/app/upgrade/v41/alphas.py", line 105, in add_siteadmin_role
    for permission_id, roles in state.permission_roles.items():
AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'items'
2011-09-14 08:43:32 INFO plone.app.upgrade End of upgrade path, migration has finished
2011-09-14 08:43:32 ERROR plone.app.upgrade The upgrade path did NOT reach current version
2011-09-14 08:43:32 ERROR plone.app.upgrade Migration has failed

If you’ve hit this, this means that you have a workflow state somewhere on your portal that has no specific permissions associated with it (or otherwise has all permissions set as Acquire). An easy way around this is to go find that workflow state (look in custom workflows!) in portal_workflow in the ZMI and temporarily change the state or states so they have a permission.

Then, go ahead and upgrade your portal to Plone 4.x and you can change your permission back.

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