Midgard Weekly Summaries

Midgard Weekly Summary #84: Year 2009 in review

henri.bergius@iki.fi (Henri Bergius) — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 11:41:27 +0000

2009 was a pretty active year for the Midgard content repository project, and so it is good to take a look at some of the highlights:

Midgard2 finally became a reality, bringing us a fully legacy-free modern Midgard implementation. There were two releases: 9.03 Vinland and 9.09 Mjolnir. Midgard2 works just fine also in desktop applications and mobile devices like the Nokia N900
Ragnaroek, the long-term support version of Midgard1 kept chugging along with four new maintenance releases and total of 566 issues closed. Ragnaroek will be maintained until October 2013
The Midgard Project turned ten years old in May. A gala evening and party was held in Helsinki, Finland
Midgard's content repository gained bindings to two new programming languages alongside existing PHP, C and Python: Objective-C in March and Vala in December
Midgard was one of the CMSs admitted to the EU-funded Interactive Knowlegde project that aims to increase semantic capabilities in content management
Qaiku, a conversational microblogging platform powered by Midgard MVC was launched in March
We had two Midgard Gatherings: in March in Linköping, Sweden and in October in Helsinki, Finland
Ragnaland became a way to bridge the gap between Midgard1 and Midgard2 by enabling running of MidCOM applications on top of Midgard MVC
Midgard was presented in several conferences including Gran Canaria Desktop Summit, FrOSCon, OpenMind and FSCONS
Founding meeting for an association to support the Midgard project was held in December. The association will provide membership to all active Midgard contributors, and an alumni membership for people who have been part of the project in the past

Happy new year to everybody in the Midgard world!

Midgard Weekly Summary #83: December 11th 2009

henri.bergius@iki.fi (Henri Bergius) — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 12:07:57 +0000

Welcome to Midgard Weekly Summaries, the weekly newsletter of happenings in the Midgard Project.

An association will be founded to support the Midgard project. Founding meeting will be at 3pm on Dec 19th in restaurant Angleterre in Helsinki, Finland
Midgard has an Activity Log that is compatible with the activitystrea.ms specification. The log is available in both MidCOM and Midgard2, and is already used in Asgard
Midgard Vala bindings make it possible to use midgard2 with the Vala programming language. See example
Midgard Brainstorming component has a new user interface that can be seen live on maemo.org
Mjolnir nightly builds are now available in the OBS mjolnir-dev repository
Development builds of midgard2-runtime are now available in the OBS unstable repository
Midgard MVC autologin on Runtime is now possible, meaning that the Runtime user is also registered authenticated with Midgard
Ragnaroek is now PHP 5.3 compatible. This support will come in next release

About Midgard
Midgard is a persistent storage framework built for the replicated world. It enables developers build applications that have their data in sync between the desktop, mobile devices and web services. It also allows for easy sharing of data between users.

Midgard does this all by building on top of technologies like GLib, libgda and D-Bus. It provides developers with object-oriented programming interfaces for C, PHP and Python. Web service developers also benefit from MidCOM, a modern MVC framework for PHP development that utilizes all the advantages of the Midgard storage framework. MidCOM helps web production also by shipping a set of content management tools.

About MWS
Midgard Weekly Summaries is a newsletter for keeping up with the happenings in the Midgard community. Notices about new published summaries will be sent to the Midgard user mailing list, Qaiku #midgard channel, and are available via RSS.

The new MWS editions are edited collaboratively to make the editing burden easier. To suggest stories here bookmark them with del.icio.us tag "midgardweeklysummary".

Midgard Weekly Summary #82: December 1st 2009

henri.bergius@iki.fi (Henri Bergius) — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 19:06:36 +0000

Welcome to Midgard Weekly Summaries, the weekly newsletter of happenings in the Midgard Project. This week's big news was new version of Qaiku, the Midgard-powered microblogging platform. Qaiku uses many Midgard MVC features, including geolocation.

Midgard2 for Maemo 5. Mjolnir and python-midgard2 are now available in the Extras Testing repository for Maemo 5. Nokia N900 owners will want to try them out and vote
Mjolnir in MacPorts. Midgard2 9.09 is now available for Mac users via MacPorts
Running MidCOM 8.09 on Midgard2 is now possible thanks to the new midgardmvc_helper_ragnaland component that bootstraps a Midgard1-like environment to run MidCOM
MidCOM3 is now Midgard MVC to clear confusion with MidCOM from Midgard1. This includes class naming, with the core now being accessible through midgardmvc_core::get_instance()
Midgard MVC configuration. The new configuration stack that enables injectors to modify configuration in run-time and provides a 25% performance boost
MgdSchema types can now contain class-level documentation. This helps in making the MgdSchema types more accessible for application developers
FirePHP logging in Ragnaroek MidCOM is now possible. This means you can get all debug information from the Midgard1 site straight into your Firebug

The new MWS editions are edited collaboratively to make the editing burden easier. To suggest stories here bookmark them with del.icio.us tag "midgardweeklysummary".

Midgard Weekly Summary #81: November 25th 2009

henri.bergius@iki.fi (Henri Bergius) — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 09:14:01 +0000

Welcome to Midgard Weekly Summaries, the weekly newsletter of happenings in the Midgard Project. Lots of activity around the Mjolnir release this week.

Midgard2 9.09 Mjolnir released. This release moves Midgard2 forward and provides a number of nice new features for Midgard developers. Binaries are available on OBS.
Content repositories compared. Midgard, JCR and CouchDB are compared in the What is a Content Repository post by Henri Bergius and Michael Marth. See also the discussion in Day's blog.
Midgard2 installer work has been started by Alexey. This will form the basis for Midgard2's new deployment model.
Firebug integration is now available in MidCOM3, allowing you to read log data and introspect requests straight from the browser
Discussion on long-term changes to MgdSchema and QB APIs has been opened by Piotras

The new MWS editions are edited collaboratively to make the editing burden easier. To suggest stories here bookmark them with del.icio.us tag "midgardweeklysummary".

Midgard Weekly Summary #80: November 18th 2009

henri.bergius@iki.fi (Henri Bergius) — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 09:22:15 +0000

Welcome to Midgard Weekly Summaries, the weekly newsletter of happenings in the Midgard Project. This MWS covers the last two weeks as Henri has been busy conferencing.

Midgard 8.09.6.1 hotfix is now available. This fixes the segfault happening in end of PHP command-line scripts
Midgard2 Runtime is now working on Linux with MidCOM3 on Midgard 9.09. A screenshot is available
Midgard OBS nightly builds are now using the OBS REST API
Qaiku benchmarked on Mjolnir. Same PHP MidCOM3 code runs 20-60% faster on Mjolnir than Ragnaroek
New Midgard authentication API in Mjolnir is now being used by MidCOM3. This allows multiple authentication methods and access levels for same user, simplifying implementations like OpenID and OAuth
$_MIDCOM and $_MIDGARD PHP superglobals are now available only if enabled via the midgard.superglobals_compat ini setting
Object properties in Mjolnir are now returned in same order as defined in MgdSchema. This makes generating documentation and forms by reflection easier
Mjolnir is nearing release. Most of blockers are now done, and the stable should be out soon
Ragnaroek net.nemein.registrations can now send email to event attendees
TinyMCE has been upgraded to version 3.2.7 in Ragnaroek. This will come in 8.09.7

The new MWS editions are edited collaboratively to make the editing burden easier. To suggest stories here bookmark them with del.icio.us tag "midgardweeklysummary".

Midgard Weekly Summary #79: November 2nd 2009

henri.bergius@iki.fi (Henri Bergius) — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 11:35:05 +0000

Welcome to Midgard Weekly Summaries, the weekly newsletter of happenings in the Midgard Project. This issue comes a bit late as Bergie has been busy in The Open Web of Ede, the Netherlands.

Midgard 9.09 nightly builds are now also available for RPM-based distributions like Fedora, RHEL and OpenSUSE thanks to jval. It is now a good time to test them before Mjolnir goes stable!
MidCOM3 is switching to Pake as the automation tool. Pake can be used for things like packaging, static file installation and scaffolding new components
Midgard2 URL parsing will be moved to be completely handled in PHP code in MidCOM3. This will enable greater flexibility with host setup and better caching. There is an experimental Mjolnir dispatcher to use this
Midgard 8.09.6.1 MidCOM hotfix was released, fixing issues like object labels in Asgard Trash and undeleting object attachments
zend_mm_heap corruption in Mjolnir PHP extension has been fixed
Midgard deletion vote on Wikipedia. A big discussion last week was the deletion vote on the Midgard page on Wikipedia. The vote result was to keep the page, with some suggestions to improve the article

The new MWS editions are edited collaboratively to make the editing burden easier. To suggest stories here bookmark them with del.icio.us tag "midgardweeklysummary".

Midgard Weekly Summary #78: October 25th 2009

henri.bergius@iki.fi (Henri Bergius) — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 17:39:20 +0000

Midgard Gathering fall 2009 special

Welcome to Midgard Weekly Summaries, the weekly newsletter of happenings in the Midgard Project. This weekend has been busy with the Midgard Gathering for fall 2009 in Helsinki, Finland, and so there are many things going on:

Midgard 8.09.6 "AmsterGard", the latest iteration of the Ragnaroek LTS series was released. This includes some 180 fixes and improvements, and is recommended to all Ragnaroek users
In addition to all the Linux distributions catered by OBS, Midgard 8.09.6 is also available in MacPorts
Alexey ran Midgard2 Mjolnir through the clang static analyzer to find lurking bugs before the release. See the report
Midgard2 installation directories were changed to "midgard2" throughout the system
Midgard photo galleries can now generate square thumbnails thanks to Solt
Work on Midgard Runtime has been started by MDK. This new revision of what was formerly known as App Builder is using Qt and can be ported to both Linux and Mac. With the Midgard Runtime you can deploy any Midgard-based web application as a local desktop app
Photos from the Midgard Gathering are already available on Flickr
Midgard2-Python-Qt4 tutorial was held to Tero Heikkinen. The example app code is available on GitHub
MidCOM3 switched to Pake from Phing that was formerly used for setup and scaffolding
Midgard2 10.03 will be developed with codename "Ratatoskr", the messenger squirrel that scampers around the tree of life in Viking mythology. Ratatoskr is small and fast

The new MWS editions are edited collaboratively to make the editing burden easier. To suggest stories here bookmark them with del.icio.us tag "midgardweeklysummary".

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Midgard Weekly Summary #77: October 16th 2009

henri.bergius@iki.fi (Henri Bergius) — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 13:42:48 +0000

Welcome to Midgard Weekly Summaries, the weekly newsletter of happenings in the Midgard Project.

SElinux support is now available and will be installed by default in Midgard 8.09.6 packages. This will be very useful, especially with Red Hat Enterprise Linux installs
Midgard's Python bindings now use standard setuptools instead of autoconf to fit the rest of the Python ecosystem better
Multilingual Content Replication has been fixed in the Ragnaroek series. The fixes will be in 8.09.6
Midgard cron service will be run for each Midgard host, not only for each sitegroup from now on
Indexing of net.nehmer.blog entries can now be disabled per folder
$_MIDGARD and $_MIDCOM superglobals are again registered by the Midgard PHP5 extension for compatibility purposes. By default they are not used, but are useful for Ragnaland
Midgard attendance in Maemo Summit was pretty good. See the group picture!
Midgard Gathering for fall 2009 will be held on October 23rd - 25th in Helsinki, Finland. See the Facebook event.

The new MWS editions are edited collaboratively to make the editing burden easier. To suggest stories here bookmark them with del.icio.us tag "midgardweeklysummary".

Midgard Weekly Summary #76: October 9th 2009

henri.bergius@iki.fi (Henri Bergius) — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 14:26:42 +0000

Welcome to Midgard Weekly Summaries, the weekly newsletter of happenings in the Midgard Project.

Ragnaroek MultiLang query optimization has been a big topic this week, with Piotras, Niels and Rambo focusing on it. Some queries have gotten 300x speed-ups in a big production databases. The optimizations will be released in upcoming 8.09.6
This weekend many Midgardians are attending the Maemo Summit 2009 in Amsterdam. With the N900s handed out during the event expect to see many Midgard tools hit Maemo-land soon
Datagard has now a command for installing Ragnaroek components
Authentication signals are now used in Mjolnir's Midgard-MVC to let different authentication handlers know if a login or logout happens
Midgard Gathering for fall 2009 will be held on October 23rd - 25th in Helsinki, Finland. See the Facebook event.

The new MWS editions are edited collaboratively to make the editing burden easier. To suggest stories here bookmark them with del.icio.us tag "midgardweeklysummary".

Midgard Weekly Summary #75: October 2nd 2009

henri.bergius@iki.fi (Henri Bergius) — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 12:34:44 +0000

Welcome to new Midgard Weekly Summaries, the weekly newsletter of happenings in the Midgard Project. MWS has been running before, with 66 issues released between 1999 and 2002, and 8 issues in 2007. But now we're back, following the idea of a Collaborative MWS.

Midgard Gathering for fall 2009 will be held on October 23rd - 25th in Helsinki, Finland. See the Facebook event.
Midgard presentation in Open Mind: Henri Bergius talked about the shared path of the Nemein company and the Midgard project in the Finnish Open Source business conference. See slides and the Qaiku discussion
Memory leaks in Mjolnir have been fixed by adding new destructor methods to midgard-python and some rewrites of the PHP bings. See Piotras's blog about the Python changes
Midgard Metadata has been made optional in Mjolnir. See tickets #1332 and #1369. This makes storage and retrieval of trivial Midgard records much more efficient and makes it easier to work with legacy databases
Token-based Trusted Authentication in Mjolnir. See ticket #1036 and some PHP examples on how to work with the new authentication system. This makes Midgard easier to integrate with other identity management systems like OpenID and Shibboleth
MidCOM 8.09.5.1 released: This version of the content management interface provides several reliability fixes to the Ragnaroek series while we're still waiting for .6 to be released to the world with all the 149 issues fixed so far.

The new MWS editions are edited collaboratively to make the editing burden easier. To suggest stories here bookmark them with del.icio.us tag "midgardweeklysummary".

Midgard Weekly Summary #74: May 11th 2007

dev@midgard-project.org (Midgard Administrator) — Fri, 11 May 2007 12:30:42 +0000

Asgard reborn. Work has started to build a new administrative interface for Midgard. Asgard is completely powered by Midgard's new reflection APIs and automatically supports managing all MgdSchema objects installed on a server
Midgard on Maemo. Piotr Pokora has successfully ported Midgard 2 to the Maemo platform used for Nokia's Internet Tablets. This will open way for building mobile and replicated Midgard applications
Midgard Python bindings on their way. Python bindings will eventually help making easy desktop applications that use Midgard as their data store
Midgard developer meeting on June 1st - 3rd. The next Midgard developer meeting will be held in Otaniemi, Finland. There is still room for some interested Midgard users and developers

About Midgard

Midgard CMS is an Open Source Content Management System built on top of the Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP (LAMP) platform. It provides a reliable, powerful and internationalized set of tools for building web sites and networked applications.

Midgard utilizes PHP as the web scripting language and provides integration interfaces on Java and C layers. Midgard's unique architecture enables it to provide services like single sign-on and replication. With these capabilities and the integrated full-text search system, Midgard is an excellent match for information-rich web sites and intranets.

Places to see Midgard in Action:

About MWS

Midgard Weekly Summaries is a newsletter for keeping up with the happenings in the Midgard community.

The new MWS editions are edited collaboratively to make the editing burden easier. To suggest stories here bookmark them with del.icio.us tag "midgardweeklysummary".

Midgard Weekly Summary #73: April 27th 2007

dev@midgard-project.org (Midgard Administrator) — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 14:53:40 +0000

This week has been busy with Midgard-related releases. The MidCOM 2.8 and Midgard 1.8.3 combo is very enticing, as it enables trying out the new replication system.

Updates to Midgard roadmap. Midgard's near-future roadmap has been clarified regarding things like deprecation of PHP4 support and MidCOM 2.9 series. This means Midgard is soon joining the ranks of proper PHP5 CMSs
Midgard 1.8.3 is out. The "Eight" release adds features like real core-powered replication and improves purging of deleted data. Grab it today!
MidCOM 2.8 goes beta. MidCOM 2.8 series has entered release cycle. MidCOM 2.8 is a new Midgard 1.8 -only series that adds better performance, proper core metadata support and a bunch of new components and other features
Ratings support. The net.nehmer.comments component can now be used for content ratings in addition to regular commenting. See it in action in Maemo Downloads
Midgard developer meeting on June 1st - 3rd. The next Midgard developer meeting will be held in Otaniemi, Finland. There is still room for some interested Midgard users and developers.

About Midgard

Places to see Midgard in Action:

About MWS

Midgard Weekly Summaries is a newsletter for keeping up with the happenings in the Midgard community.

The new MWS editions are edited collaboratively to make the editing burden easier. To suggest stories here bookmark them with del.icio.us tag "midgardweeklysummary". Screenshots may also be suggested by tagging them with "midgardweeklysummary" on Flickr.

Midgard Weekly Summary #72: April 13th 2007

dev@midgard-project.org (Midgard Administrator) — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 12:14:54 +0000

Today is the Accident Prevention Day in Finland.

Staging to live replication. Midgard has had some degree of replication support since the early days, but as the software has evolved the requirements have become more complex. After the Exorcist-based staging-to-live solution was deprecated by new Midgard APIs, the work to build a native replication solution has been underway. Now it finally is ready for testing.
New midgard_sitegroup and midgard_user APIs. Piotras has this week completed the last two important missing Midgard2 APIs: Sitegroup management and user management. This means that we will hopefully see first versions of the new installer soon.
Repeating resource reservations. Arttu Manninen has been working on Midgard's resource booking calendar reported earlier in MWS #70. New features include support for repeating reservations.
Midgard developer meeting on June 1st - 3rd. The next Midgard developer meeting will be held in Otaniemi, Finland. There is still room for some interested Midgard users and developers.

About Midgard

Places to see Midgard in Action:

About MWS

Midgard Weekly Summaries is a newsletter for keeping up with the happenings in the Midgard community.

Midgard Weekly Summary #71: April 5th 2007

dev@midgard-project.org (Midgard Administrator) — Thu, 05 Apr 2007 16:08:09 +0000

Midgard developer meeting on June 1st - 3rd. The next Midgard developer meeting will be held in Helsinki University of Technology campus. Both developers and users are most welcome to join the event! There have been some thoughts of combining it with a Midgard seminar during friday the 1st.
MidCOM style editor preview. Arttu Manninen has posted information on the new MidCOM style editor. The style editor helps MidCOM site builders to customize output templates of the system to their needs. The editor is available in the MidCOM 2.7 branch
Midgard 1.8.3 preview out. Piotr Pokora has published a preview of the upcoming 1.8.3 release into the developer downloads section. The new release fixes some command-line PHP usage issues and adds features to the replication interface
Lots of other things are also happening. Recent commits have included things like user-provided rating support for any Midgard object, new replication services and initial Mono bindings. Some of these will be featured in the next MWS issue. Keep the suggestions coming!

About Midgard

Places to see Midgard in Action:

About MWS

Midgard Weekly Summaries is a newsletter for keeping up with the happenings in the Midgard community.

Midgard Weekly Summary #70: March 23rd 2007

dev@midgard-project.org (Midgard Administrator) — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 13:26:27 +0000

I'm back from the arctic hunting trip. One week away from even the cell phone network felt really good and the aurora borealis were simply gorgeous. Now it is time to again catch up with happenings in the Midgard community...

Happenings this week

New Midgard-Java on its way. Jukka Zitting created initial Java bindings for Midgard back in 2005, but these did not keep up with the new APIs in Midgard core. Now an effort to revive them has been started by Piotr Pokora and Juhana Hirvilahti. There have also been rumors of Mono bindings
Blogs from a Midgard newbie. Jaakko Tepponen is a new addition to Finnish Teleservice Center's web team. He is blogging about his Midgard learning experiences
Resource calendar in PEAR. Midgard's resource booking calendar has just hit 1.0.0 in PEAR. This means it is easier than ever to manage bookable resources like meeting rooms, cars, cabins or aircraft with Midgard
Midgard in the Finnish parliamentary elections. This year's elections had at least two candidates powering their campaign with Midgard. Midgard has lots of useful campaign features like mobile blogging and a direct marketing system capable of sending both email newsletters and SMS

About Midgard

Places to see Midgard in Action:

About MWS

Midgard Weekly Summaries is a newsletter for keeping up with the happenings in the Midgard community.

Midgard Weekly Summary #69: March 8th 2007

dev@midgard-project.org (Midgard Administrator) — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 14:27:28 +0000

This week's MWS is a bit thin because of time constraints. This means some interesting things like MidCOM's new style editor will be left to MWS #70.

Happenings this week

Midgard talk in Norway. Henri Bergius will be talking about Midgard CMS - building a business around an open source application developed as a joint venture between multiple companies in the Open Source in Business conference arranged by Den Norske Dataforening in Kristiansand on March 29th
SyncML in OpenPsa. Thanks to Juhana Hirvilahti, latest CVS checkout of OpenPsa's SyncML plugin works for synchronizing Midgard-based calendars with various mobile devices. The plugin runs inside Funambol's SyncML framework
Multilingual content management. Midgard supports Multilingual content management very nicely in MidCOM 2.7. Jerry Jalava reports on his implementation
No MWS next week. I'm off hunting willow grouse in Lapland next week.

About Midgard

Places to see Midgard in Action:

About MWS

Midgard Weekly Summaries is a newsletter for keeping up with the happenings in the Midgard community.

Midgard Weekly Summary #68: March 2nd 2007

dev@midgard-project.org (Midgard Administrator) — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 14:04:44 +0000

Happenings this week

midgard-core 1.8.2.2 hotfix released. The hotfix resolves some issues on multilingual Midgard sites
New features in personnel component. Arttu Manninen has added nice Ajax-based reorganization and editing features to the personnel display component of MidCOM. Grab the latest version from PEAR!
Midgard gets geotagging. Midgard's geo capabilities have now been amended by supporting the Flickr-style machine tags. This enables people submitting content to Midgard via email or for example Flickr integration to position and tag their content easily. The geotags will also show up in GeoRSS output.
Midgard configuration with PHP. Piotr Pokora has added PHP bindings to managing Midgard's unified configuration. The bindings will be the basis for the new Midgard installer and enable easy creation of Midgard databases with multiple providers like MySQL, Postgres and SQLite
Exceptions in Midgard. Midgard's development version has finally deprecated PHP4 support, enabling us to utilize features like exceptions. Next it will be interesting to start using PHP 5.2 datetimes everywhere instead of the current mixture of UNIX timestamps and datetime text fields

About Midgard

Places to see Midgard in Action:

About MWS

Midgard Weekly Summaries is a newsletter for keeping up with the happenings in the Midgard community.

Midgard Weekly Summary #67: February 23rd 2007

dev@midgard-project.org (Midgard Administrator) — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 12:03:20 +0000