Announcement: Midgard 8.09.0RC2 "Ragnaroek" released!
-
Piotr Pokora
Announcement: Midgard 8.09.0RC2 "Ragnaroek" released!
Thu October 02 2008 13:06:07 UTCLodz, October 2nd 2008 -- The Midgard Project has released second 'Release Canditate' release of 8.09 "Ragnaroek LTS" generation of the Midgard Content Management System. Midgard is a mature Free Software CMS package targeted for mid-to-high-end web services. About this release Midgard 8.09.0RC "Ragnaroek LTS" release is the fourth release of Midgard following the new time-based release process. Because of this, versioning numbering of both Midgard and MidCOM have been synchronized to follow a date-based pattern. Using old version numbering the software included in this release would have been Midgard 1.9 and MidCOM 2.9. The new release process has been created to align Midgard with the release synchronicity model followed by free software projects like GNOME and Ubuntu.
When finalized, the 8.09 "Ragnaroek LTS" will be a Long Term Support version of Midgard for which bug fixes and minor feature improvements will be supplied by the Midgard community for several years. It is recommended that all Midgard users upgrade their installations to the Midgard 8.09 series for stability, performance and maintainance reasons. Upgrade from MidCOM 2.8 installations running with PHP5 has been made as seamless as possible.
The version is targeted to ease transition from web services using the deprecated Midgard 1.x APIs to the new Midgard2 architecture. Because of this, the release provides both API versions. This means that the release can be used to run both Midgard 1 applications like the version 2.9 of the MidCOM component framework, and Midgard2 applications like MidCOM3.
Changes from Midgard 1.8 and MidCOM 2.8:
- Midgard and MidCOM now follow an unified release schedule and roadmap
- There is a new command-line database and website setup utility
- There is a new Site Wizard web interface for website creation
- PHP4 support has been removed in favor of PHP5
- GObject attributes of Midgard objects are directly mapped to PHP objects for performance reasons
- Repligard package has been removed and replaced by new built in replication API
- The MidCOM framework uses autoloading to reduce memory usage and processing time
- Prototype Javascript framework has been removed in favor of jQuery
- New Midgard logo and graphical guidelines have been deployed across the system
- Packages are built for several Linux distributions using the openSuse Build Service
- Classic Midgard API has been deprecated in favor of MgdSchema and Query Builder, but is available via --with-legacy-api configuration switch in midgard-php5
- midgard-config command-line tool replaced with Midgard configuration supported by pkg-config
In addition Midgard 8.09 provides new experimental ("Midgard2") features for developers:
- D-Bus signals from I/O events, and ability to pass D-Bus messages through Midgard API
- Event handling also available for languages without event support (like PHP5)
- New authentication and user management API
- New API for objects' attachments and parameters
- New API for binary blobs
Planned for next releases
- First stable release of 8.09 ("Ragnaroek LTS"): October 6th, 2008
- Long Term Supported Midgard version
- First Midgard 9.03 ("Midgard2") stable release: March 2009
- Targeted as general, replicated persistent storage framework reaching further than just the web
- Automated database MgdSchema management and table initialization
- Language bindings for Python and Mono (.Net)
- Support for different database back-ends like PostgreSQL, SQLite, Oracle and MS SQL
- Completely rewritten high-performance MidCOM model-view-controller framework for PHP ("MidCOM3")
- XMPP Peer-to-Peer replication
- Removed Apache module
- Redesigned and web server independent PHP extension (Apache and Lighttpd support)
- Development coordinated via Git instead of Subversion
About Midgard Midgard is a capable open source content management package targeted for mid-to-high-end websites. The Midgard community has always focused on clean and manageable code, high security and multilingual support in the toolkit.
Some feature highlights:
- Modular system that allows construction of a site by creating a directory hierarchy powered by different components
- Powerful templating of all output in the system
- Highly configurable content entry views
- Full caching of generated pages and uploaded file attachments
- "Double click to edit" on-site WYSIWYG editing
- Comprehensive access controls
- Content replication for clustered setups and staging/live publishing
- Hosting multiple sites and organizations within one Midgard installation
- Full-text search powered by SOLR
The components available for Midgard provide functionality ranging from typical content-oriented websites to highly personalized web services supporting features like geographical positioning and recommendation mining. Several Midgard components include integration features for synchronizing content from popular Social Web services like Flickr, Jaiku and Twitter.
Midgard includes:
- System library for persistent storage, replication and interprocess communication
- Apache module for HTTP request mapping
- PHP5 extension for object-oriented data handling API
- MidCOM MVC framework for PHP5
- Content management tools and user interfaces
- Additional components that may be installed using the PEAR package management tool
Get started with Midgard today! Licensing
- Midgard and MidCOM are available under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL)
- Some tools bundled in Midgard distribution are available under other open source licenses like GPL and Apache Software License
System requirements
- Linux, Unix or any POSIX server
- Apache 2.x HTTP server
- GLib 2 C library
- PHP 5.x programming language
- MySQL 5.x database
- APC or other PHP byte code cache recommended
- 1GB of RAM or more recommended (with MidCOM3 256MB is enough)
Find out more about Midgard
- Download page and changelog of latest release
- Documentation wiki
- Unofficial Midgard wiki
- Trac bug and project tracker
- Ohloh analysis on Midgard sources
Midgard Community Since 1999, Midgard has been worked on by an international team of free software developers. Unlike many other open source CMS projects, Midgard is not controlled by a single corporation, but instead the development work is coordinated and shared by a cluster of organizations mainly located in north Europe. All decisions and development directions in the community are discussed openly, and the decisions are made in Midgard Gatherings - events that are arranged twice a year.
Midgard is a large and mature code base that is being actively developed. Copyrights to the Midgard software are owned by the community members. Contact the community
- Mailing lists
- IRC: #midgard on irc.freenode.net
- #Midgard on Jaiku
More information Piotr Pokora, Midgard release manager piotrek.pokora(at)gmail.com
Henri Bergius, Midgard spokesman henri.bergius(at)iki.fi
The Midgard Project website www.midgard-project.org
