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From: "Ken Pooley" <kpooley@sewanee.edu>
To: "MWS" <mws@midgard-project.org>, <user@midgard-project.org>,
Subject: MWS #55: What should be in the Midgard Site,  1.4.1 is coming, A 2.0 road map, Midgard on IRC!
Date: Fri, 12 Jan 2001 02:58:15 -0600

MWS #55, January 11th 2001
Greetings!

It has been an interesting time in the world of Midgard. After a lot of
work, by a lot of people, 1.4 is stable and released. There is concrete
movement towards 2.0 and Ami Ganguli has pretty specific requests for help
and a good timeline marking out where and when we should see pieces along
the way. Bergie has returned from his stint with Finland’s finest and is
motivated to push the project “to be all it can be”; I am working on an
interview with Bergie that should be ready in the next issue or so. There
are discussions crossing all of the lists about how to rework the Midgard
Project site to better serve the wide range of users who need resources and
support. There is a new IRC channel, sponsored by Torben Nehmer, to give all
of us a place to meet when we just can’t get to Paris. I am still interested
in talking to current Midgard users who would like to answer questions about
how they use Midgard and what it has brought to their organization.


Contents:

Editor's Note

Discussion of Midgard-project.org and its future.
	Bergie starts a discussion of what we need from the project website.
1.4 is out and 1.4.1 is on the way.
	PHP 4 and Repligard in late January.
A revised timetable and roadmap for Midgard 2.
Good news:We are on schedule. Bad news: Here is the list of things to do, or
no 2.0 for you!
A Midgard IRC Channel debuts.
	It’s a good way to ask a question when that “;” is looking so wrong.



============================
Discussion of Midgard-project.org and its future.
----------------------------
One of the first things Henri Bergius initiated upon returning to the list
was an ongoing discussion of what information and services should be
included in the Midgard-Project website. There have been a number of
threads. They are mostly related to the need to make basic information
available to new users, readily assist with software installation and make
the documentation as easy to access as possible. This is a really important
discussion for the whole Midgard community to participate in, if you haven’t
put in your .2 euros, you should think about it. The growth of the installed
Midgard server base over the last year has been tremendous, this growth
brings with it a lot of different perspectives and valuable experience.
There should be a requirements document coming out of the discussion and all
will be urged to review it when the time comes.

============================
1.4 is out and 1.4.1 is on the way.
----------------------------
Midgard 1.4 was released, on schedule right, around Christmas day and seems
to be a successful release. There have been relatively few bugs reported
though all are encouraged to check in, and if necessary report bugs at the
bug tracking webpage, http://www.midgard-project.org/bugs/. The bug tracker
is also the place to request features in future versions.

The next release, 1.4.1, is scheduled for late January. 1.4.1 is intended to
provide support for Php4 as well as provide fully functional and integrated
Repligard. 1.4.1 is the last planned release in the 1.x tree, as most
development energies will turn towards 2.0 over the next few months. There
is potential for a 1.5 release but that will only happen if feature needs
arise which are appropriate to the architecture of 1.4.



============================
A revised timetable and roadmap for Midgard 2.
----------------------------
Ami Ganguli has been working hard on writing the core of what will become
Midgard 2.0. He has released a revised road map for the development process
and a timeline for completion of the various stages (The web version of this
article will have the text of the road map appended to it.)  Most
encouraging is a projected completion date for the whole version of December
1st. In the mean time there is a lot of work to be done. The code is being
written in C and the development projects are currently prioritized
according to their relative effort and priority. While the schedule is
ambitious it is also assembled in such a way that parts can be easily
dropped if they prove unwieldy or they consume too many resources. The
modular nature of Midgard 2.0 should allow enough feature extensibility that
parts dropped now can be re-included at a later date if resources allow.




============================
A Midgard IRC Channel debuts.
----------------------------
Torben Nohmer has put up an Internet Relay Chat channel and has been trying
to moniter it most days. IRC is a great way to get in touch with someone who
can help you out, in real time, when you get stuck on that one line of
Midgard script that just won’t work, compile or go away. Even though it
seems like Emile is running an e-mail based chat it is just an illusion, as
we have recently discovered he, does go on vacation and there is not a T-1
on the beach in Surinam.
Torben, however, does not vacation in faraway places. He is online most
afternoons and evenings but is looking for others to cover those times when
he isn’t available. The IRC channel is #Midgard, the server is found at
irc.Midgard-project.org. Like the discussion forum Jakob Nielsen posted at
http://www.jakobnielsen.net/midgardforum/viewboard.phtml?BoardID=1, IRC is a
great place to toss out that nagging question see what comes back. I will
try to be there during the day, central standard time (GMT-6), as soon as I
get back to my office everyday.



============================

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

(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


----------------------------
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


============================