Midgard Weekly Summary for February 16, 2001

Date: Fri, 16 Feb 2001 14:28:48 -0600
From: Ken Pooley kpooley@sewanee.edu
To: MWS <mws@midgard-project.org>

Greetings!

The last few weeks have been quite eventful. 1.4.1 b1 was
released and work is progressing on a final release. Paris and
Brussels were hives of Midgard activity with LinuxWorld, OSDEM and
the Midgard Developer’s meeting all happening. All reports are that
Alexander, Emile and Ami were excellent. In Hong Kong Alan Knowles
has released a second version of the Linux Center’s excellent
Framed Admin site. Lastly Henri has started a discussion, mostly on
the list, about the future role of the non-profit Midgard Ry which
owns the Midgard core code.

Contents:

Editor’s Note

Developer's Meeting and OSDEM
        Notes and pointers to pictures
1.4.1 Progress
        Beta 1 has been released, Beta 2
Framed Admin from HKLC
The Hong Kong Linux Center, at work in new offices on a new admin
application
The Future of the Ry
 There is some discussion what and who Midgard will be.

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Developer’s Meeting and OSDEM

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The first weekend in February brought a public Midgard showing and
the semi-annual Midgard Developer’s Meeting. At OSDEM, in Brussels,
Alexander Bokovoy and Ami Ganguli made presentations about the
recently released Midgard 1.4 as well as the coming Midgard 2.0.
Emile also sat in on one of the round table discussions. Reports
are that everyone represented the Midgard community exceptionally
well. There is a site with RealMedia presentations of some of the
conference sessions, I have not seen Ami, Alexander or Emile but I
am told that more content will be added. The URL is
http://www.opensource-tv.com .

February 5th saw the Midgard Developers meeting in Paris. In
attendance were Alexander, Emile, David, Ami, Jean-Noel, Loic,
Armand and Henri. Planning was set in place for the last 1.4
releases as well as more firm planning for Midgard 2.0 planning.
The road map for 2.0 has the final release planned for the end of
this calendar year. Basic application core features should be
finished by July, with optional features to be added over July,
August and September. In addition to immediate needs for help, the
developing group also needs to start hearing from people who have
feature requests, especially those which concern the enduser
experience. Photos from the meetings can be found at:
http://bergie.envida.org/gallery/145.html

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1.4.1 Progress

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1.4.1 Beta was released last week with the Final Candidate due in
early March. The main goal of 1.4.1 is to add Php4 support to
Midgard. At this point that part of the project looks promising;
there are a few problems Asgard and snippets but they seem to have
more to do with differences between Php3 and 4 than the Midgard
application. There are also further refinements to Repligard to
look forward to. There will probably be one more beta release for
1.4.1 then a final relese. The goal at this point is to have one
more planned release in the 1.4 tree for bug fixes only, 1.4.2 is
planned for April.

The 1.4.1 beta one can be downloaded from:
http://www.midgard-project.org/article/55582.html

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Framed Admin from HKLC

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Alan Knowles announced the availability of the Hong Kong Linux
Center’s Framed Admin Release Milestone 2. This release includes
bug fixes as well as a number of new features. Most of the
functionality is built into snippets which can be removed if
necessary. There are modules for webmail, webstats and multilingual
features including a Chinese language version. The HKLC Admin
release has been a great addition to the Midgard community and has
done a great deal to expand what the Midgard experience can be.
More information can be found at:
http://www.hklc.com/projects/557.html

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The Future of the Ry

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There have been important discussions on the Midgard list about the
future and form of the non profit entity which owns the Midgard
code and associated intellectual properties. Currently Midgard is
owned by a nonprofit organization, The Midgard Project Ry. This
situation works, but there is some thought about what more we could
be accomplishing.

Changes in Php and its licensing are pushing Midgard from one
side while the promise of Midgard 2.0 with its independence from
proprietary programming languages pulls from the other side. There
may or may not be a necessity of change but the opportunity to
re-examine the protection, control and promotion of Midgard should
not pass. One proposal would shift the ownership of the copyright
for Midgard to the Free Software Foundation. The idea would be that
this would free the Midgard Project organization to better
represent the business interests of the Midgard community
membership. This, however, could jeopardize the perception of
impartiality of the association. These questions, basically,
revolve around what the community needs from the official Midgard
body and what the community can invest in the organization. Input
from the extended community would be welcomed and can be sent to
the list, if the discussion evolves there are a number of threaded
forums we might take advantage of, including Commentext, which
would facilitate the discussion.

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About Midgard

Midgard 1.4 is a content publishing tool for small and medium
sized sites. It is based on Apache, MySQL and PHP. The application
and its documentation are licensed GPL, LGPL and GFDL. This
licensing strategy guarantees that developers, webmasters, ISPs,
and business managers are investing in a strategy where they’re
free to share solutions and participate in the application
design.

-> http://www.midgard-project.org

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About MWS

The Midgard Weekly Summary is a bi-weekly newsletter for the
Midgard user and developer community, as well as the extended web
community. If you would like to release it or publish it, please
contact Ken Pooley
(kpooley@sewanee.edu).

Previous issues of Midgard Weekly Summary can be found archived
at the Midgard web site.

-> http://www.midgard-project.org/topic/169.html

Midgard mailing list.

The Midgard mailing list is one of the most vital and visible
aspects of the Midgard Community. Questions get answered,
suggestions debated and work gets done.
E-mail:midgard@greywolves.org

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Places to see Midgard in Action:
http://www.midgard-project.org

http://www.hklc.com
http://www.5fthigh.com/
http://www.linuxde.org/
http://www.hec.nl/
http://www.stonejobs.com/
http://www.cruisexcursions.com/

http://www.sewanee.edu

-More to come

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