Greetings! After a long lay-off the Midgard Weekly Summary is back. This issue was mailed once, last week, but seems to have been eaten by the mailer, we are working on that. Known to most as the MWS, this publication is a bi-weekly newsletter which seeks to keep everyone in the Midgard world current with developments across the user and developer base. At the same time the MWS is sent to a number of media outlets to let the rest of the world know what we are up to. The MWS is a community-based effort and we really rely on Midgard developers and users to let us know what they are doing and what their needs/interests are. Torben Nehmer and I are sharing the editorial duties and would encourage anyone who wants to write or contribute ideas to contact us.
Contents: Editor's Note Midgard Team News Midgard Knowledgebase Debian Archive for Midgard Midgard Component (MidCOM) Framework SpiderAdmin - Improved Oldadmin ------------------------------------ Midgard Team News __________ The core Midgard Team has gone through a number of changes over the last year. While Henri, and the rest of Nemein, is still hard at work in Finland, Alexander continues to contribute from Belarus and Allan is working in Hong Kong there are a number of new faces on the team as well as a few long time community members who have stepped up to take a more active role in the community. The saddest news is that long time Midgard lead developer Emiliano Heyns was injured in a skydiving accident and is off his feet, on his back and taking a much needed break. He is getting better every day, but it will be at least a couple of months before Emiliano will be able to again begin participating in active Midgard Development. All our best wishes to you Emiliano, we owe you a lot... Torben Nehmer has increased his participation in Midgard during the last weeks. He volunteered for Release and Bug Management and was gladly accepted by the community. Any suggestions for those two sections are welcome. Philipp Rotmann began updating the current Midgard Documentation, starting with the function reference. His work can already be seen on the Midgard Online Manual, where the Person reference has been improved considerably. There have been a number of efforts over the last few years to build a comprehensive body of documentation and hopefully Philipp will bring all the pieces together at last. ------------------------------------ Midgard Knowledgebase __________ Torben Nehmer has started building a Midgard Knowledgebase [1]. He has begun collecting Midgard documents [2], helper functions [3] of all sorts and helper classes [4] for OO-like programming on his website [5]. All this material is under the GNU GPL, so you may use the code there freely. Highlights are the customized record sorting/grouping functions [6], which can sort and group Midgard result sets after any field you like and the Midgard Base Classes [7] that give you a clean way of inheriting from native Midgard classes. (Keep in mind that these classes are not fully tested yet). [1] http://www.nathan-syntronics.de/midgard/ [2] http://www.nathan-syntronics.de/midgard/docs/ [3] http://www.nathan-syntronics.de/midgard/snippets/ [4] http://www.nathan-syntronics.de/midgard/oop/ [5] http://www.nathan-syntronics.de/ (in German!) [6] http://www.nathan-syntronics.de/midgard/snippets/sorting/ [7] http://www.nathan-syntronics.de/midgard/oop/baseclasses/ ------------------------------------ Debian Archive for Midgard __________ The Midgard Team, lead by Piotras, is starting to build a Debian Archive. It will include three parts, unstable, testing and stable. Unstable will hold the nightly builds and is mainly intended for development and for the very brave. Testing is for all our pre-releases, release-candidates and bugfix-tests. This is where the "we-think-they-are-stable" packages go for testing cycles done by the community. Stable is, you might have imagined it, where our official releases will be. These releases will eventually also go into the official Debian archives. All three parts will give you packages for potato, woody and sid if we can keep our initial idea. As soon as the plans of the Archive structure have solidified, more detailed download instructions will appear on the Midgard download pages [1]. [1] http://www.midgard-project.org/downloads/ ------------------------------------ Midgard Component (MidCOM) Framework __________ Torben Nehmer has started the development of a Midgard-based component framework. Its intent is to provide an easily extensible Application Framework. It should -- in its ultimate implementation -- enable end users to "click their sites together" using common Components for news tickers, discussion boards or other sharable objects. Here is a short introduction from the architecture specification [1]: "What Midgard currently lacks most is an easy way of importing applications into an existing site. Most written applications are site-specific and can hardly be exported into another site without great customization. This is where Midgard Components come in: Every MidCOM application is contained within a Component with an explicitly defined interface to the world. Controlling infrastructure is the topic tree not the page tree giving you a far greater flexibility. The code itself is completely encapsulated in snippets, making replication very easy. A framework is used to manage the components, both for public and private sites such as a web site and its administrative site. In theory this could even automate the building of administration interfaces by "traversing" every active component." Currently only the first official alpha version can be downloaded from [2], which implements only the basic component handling. Latest development does include the Stages two and three of the framework which will give you abstract access to the navigation tree along with a more flexible Style Engine. A first beta-release will be available soon. [1] http://www.nathan-syntronics.de/midgard/docs/midcom.html [2] http://users.nehmer.net/~classic/MidCOM-0.1.1.tar.bz2 ------------------------------------ SpiderAdmin - Improved Oldadmin __________ The SpiderGroup [1] has prepared a first Release Candidate of their new administration interface called SpiderAdmin. It is developed in the spirit of OldAdmin, the first Midgard administration application. The user interface remains roughly the same, but it supports all of the new Midgard 1.4 features. The RC can be downloaded at [2] and bugs in it can be reported at the Midgard bugtracker [3]. The project is searching volunteers for translation of the user interface [5]. Please contact Sergey Dolmatov [6] for further details. [1] http://www.spider.ru/ (Russian) [2] http://test.dolmatov.dsb.ru/ (admin/password) [3] http://dolmatov.dsb.ru/~sergei/spider-admin.xml.gz [4] http://bugs.midgard-project.org/ (Project SpiderAdmin) [5] http://dolmatov.dsb.ru/~sergei/mgdadminsite.po [6] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] ============================ 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 ---------------------------- 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 ([EMAIL PROTECTED]). 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. 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