Date: Wed, 8 Sep 1999 18:04:16 +0300 (EEST) From: Henri Bergius <Henri.Bergius@iki.fi> Subject: MWS for 8th of September, 1999 (#15) To: midgard@greywolves.org, lwn@lwn.net, chris@linuxdev.net, deb@linuxchix.org Greetings! This has been a week of intense work for most in the Midgard team. We had a new release in last Friday, and the mailing list and Midgard's Web site have both experienced lots of growth in volume. The overall status of the project seems to be quite good, and the pace of development healthy. We have been so far focusing on the 'classic' (MySQL-dependent) Midgard series, working on some new and urgently needed features. When those are complete, the work on ODBC and modularization of the database related functions will begin. But now to the headlines, which are quite development-oriented this week... ============================ ---------------------------- Current versions: Stable: 1.2.1 (Mad King) Devel.: 1.3 ---------------------------- ============================ Midgard 1.2.1 released Jukka Zitting released the latest of Midgard's stable 'Mad King' series, version 1.2.1 This new version contains some bug fixes, and minor feature improvements. The requested support for cleartext passwords is also present, as is the possibility of compiling Midgard to Apache as a static module. Our distribution system seems to be functioning quite nicely. Only some hours after the actual release we already started getting reports in of successful installations. The binaries (Red Hat and Mandrake) were also released quite soon afterwards. Good work, everyone! You can find the 1.2.1 release on Midgard's download page: -> http://www.midgard-project.org/download/ ---------------------------- Improved Access Control A feature that many Midgard users seem to need is a better way of controlling access to different parts of the database. Currently Midgard mostly controls permissions for modifying material, leaving the rest for user-developed PHP applications. This of course isn't the ideal way to do things, and we ought to work on a better access controlling system. Midgard developer Emile Heyns posted his view on the matter to Midgard's mailing list. Jukka approved the idea so this will probably find itself to one of the development versions in the near future. -> http://www.progressive-comp.com/Lists/?l=midgard&m=93665655506800&w=2 ---------------------------- Midgard File Format Following a proposal drafted by me, Jukka created a plan for Midgard's own file format. The file format would be used for distributing parts of a Midgard datebase between different servers, and would be good for exchanging applications, content, or layout. I personally feel that such a file format and its accompanying package management system will be an important component needed for Midgard's further development, and that the plans we have for it currently will make it a good and functional part of the Midgard way of creating Web sites. In a nutshell the package format would be XML files describing Midgard database structures packed together by tar and gzip. For those interested about it, the email I sent on the subject is available in the mailing list archives. -> http://www.progressive-comp.com/Lists/?l=midgard&m=93635619115228&w=2 ---------------------------- Future of Midgard's ID fields The package management system mentioned above was approved by Midgard's lead developer Jukka Zitting. Of course, before such a system could be developed, some obstacles for easy replication of data between different Midgard servers must be removed. The most important of these is the way Midgard uses ID fields for queries. To solve this problem, Jukka has posted a plan to the mailing list: -> http://www.progressive-comp.com/Lists/?l=midgard&m=93669491003410&w=2 ============================ ============================ About Midgard Midgard is a freely-available Web application development and publishing platform based on the popular PHP scripting language. It is an Open Source development project, giving you the freedom to create your solutions in an open environment. Midgard is the tool for creating, modifying and maintaining dynamic database-enabled web services. -> http://www.midgard-project.org ---------------------------- About MWS The Midgard Weekly Summary is a newsletter for the Midgard user and developer community. The MWS is currently being distributed in following mediums: -The Midgard Project's Web site -> http://www.midgard-project.org -Linux Weekly News -> http://www.lwn.net -Linux Developer's Network -> http://linuxdev.net -Open Source Writers Group -> http://www.thepuffingroup.com/oswg -Midgard mailing list If you would like to release it elsewhere, please contact Henri Bergius (Henri.Bergius@iki.fi). Previous issues of Midgard Weekly Summary can be found archived at the Midgard web site. -> http://www.midgard-project.org/topic/169.html ============================ /Bergie -- -- Henri Bergius -- +358 40 525 1334 -- Henri.Bergius@iki.fi -- http://www.iki.fi/Henri.Bergius