Re: [midgard-user] A new 'About Midgard' document

[Philipp Rotmann, Linksystem Muenchen]

     Hi Henri,

On 19.02.01 (20:51), Henri Bergius wrote:
> Here's a quick draft for a new 'About Midgard'
> document to the Midgard site. Please comment.
> 
> The free CMS solution

As a slogan, that's too 'cheap' for me -- in my eyes, it
disregards Midgard's power and scalability, sorry.  I think it
would be o.k. to leave the 'free' part to the abstract (see
below) and concentrate on the power here, as most IT managers
won't look on the price tag first (though more of them will look
more closely after the recent news ;-)).

> Midgard is a freely-available solution for managing content on

"an Open Source solution (freely-available for any kind of use)"?

> web and WAP services. It is also a toolkit for building
> dynamic applications to power eBusiness and Information
> Management processes. Midgard has been built and is actively
> maintained a global group of software professionals working

"maintained _by_ a"

> together in this Open Source project.

The OS reference could then be removed here.

> --- The about document ---
> 
> About Midgard
(...)

> The software
> 
> Midgard is a powerful toolkit for managing online information.
> Writing applications and functionalities to the platform is
> done using the easy-to-learn PHP scripting language. All
> interfacing with the system is done via standard web
> interfaces, and no special tools are needed for developers or
> content authors.

First question that comes to my mind (maybe my mind only): What
can I do _without_ a programming language? Well, not much at the
moment, and that's another story (that of packaged Midgard apps
distributed with Midgard itself or downloadable at the website).
Sorry for the interruption.

> Main features of Midgard include:
> 
> - Easy and well documented Application Programming Interface (API)
> - Tree-based content storage
> - Attachment of meta-data to all content objects
> - Multiple levels of personalization
> - Replication between servers for clustered environments and staging
> - Separation of layout, content and site logic
> - Support for editorial workflow and approval mechanisms
> - Multilingual support and localization
> - Completely Open Source and based on common standards

I'd shuffle these a bit in order to reflect my perspective as
both business manager and web developer:

| - Completely Open Source and based on common standards
| - Separation of layout, content and site logic
| - Multilingual support and localization
| - Support for editorial workflow and approval mechanisms
| - Replication between servers for clustered environments and
|   staging
| - Multiple levels of personalization

Support for ..., I'd say here as well.

| - Easy and well documented Application Programming Interface
|   (API)
| - Tree-based content storage
| - Attachment of meta-data to all content objects

... user-defined meta-data? It's not just the extra* fields
anymore ;-)

I almost reversed your order; my goal was to put the more
abstract, less technical ones on top.

> The requirements
> 
> The Midgard system can be run on most Linux and UNIX
> environments that have the following software available:
> 
> - Apache HTTP server
> - PHP4 scripting language
> - MySQL database server
> - Glib abstraction library
> - Expat XML parser
> 
> There are included in most Linux distributions. For other UNIX
> platforms, please refer either to the software developer
> organization or your operating system vendor.
> 
> The community
> 
> Being an Open Source project, Midgard has gathered around
> itself an active community of users and developers. This
> community that Midgard is bein continously developed, and will

... ensures that Midgard is being ...

> support new standards and features when those are being
> required.
> 
> The community process provides Midgard users a good level of
> guidance and support, and also ways to contribute to the
> development project. Because of this, many companies are

Many? How about "a number of ..."?

> investing their resources to helping the community to grow and
> the project to meet important development goals.
> 
> The Midgard mailing lists and newsletters are a valuable
> source of information related to installation, usage and
> development of the Midgard system. Also, many active Midgard
> developers are also available for discussion using the IRC
> chat system.

How about the Midgard web site? Just to be mentioned as well.

> The history
> 
> Midgard was originally developed for providing a small Finnish
> history association, The Grey Wolves
> (http://www.greywolves.org) a system for publishing their

... with a system ... (?, unsure about my English)

> material online.
> 
> Since the organization didn't have resources to maintain a
> large development project by itself, the Open Source model was
> chosen for creating a community of contributors to the system.
> The version 1.0 of Midgard was released to the public on May

I'd drop the "The" at the beginning. Native speakers?

> 8th 1999. It attracted a steady stream of users, and the
> development project flourished.
> 
> Since then, Midgard has evolved into a full-blown content
> management system, and a toolkit for web application
> development. It has gathered an active community of hundreds
> of users and developers working on the system. However, the
> development hasn't stopped by any means, and new ideas and
> standards are being added to it on daily basis.

Cool altogether -- I can only second Emile and hope your
day-and-night job leaves the project enough of your time and
creativity. Maybe in these other twenty-four hours a day ... ;-)

     Good night,
     Philipp
-- 
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