Date: Wed, 29 Mar 2000 22:26:56 +0300 (EEST)
From: Henri Bergius <Henri.Bergius@iki.fi>
Subject: MWS for 29th of March, 2000 (#34)
To: midgard@greywolves.org, lwn@lwn.net, marty@linuxtoday.com,

Greetings!

Here are some news items of mention since
last MWS. I'll be on the road for most of
the next couple of weeks, so it is not 
clear whether there will be summaries  
during that time, but we'll try.

============================
----------------------------

Current versions:
	Stable: 1.2.5 (Mad King)
	Devel.: 1.2.6-beta2

----------------------------
============================

Midgard and database support

It seems that there is a lot of interest
in getting Midgard to operate with other
databases than MySQL already in the 1.x
branch.

The Oracle port project lead by Jean-Pierre
Arneodo has been going on for some time now,  
and they hope to release a stable version of
Oracle-enabled midgard-lib within a week.

Their PHP implementation is still somewhat
work in progress, and due to database 
incompatibilities they believe that it won't
be 100% compatible with the MySQL version of
Midgard. However, this should be corrected
when we move to the Midgard 2 architecture.

Besides the Oracle port, there has also been
talk of enabling Midgard to use the PostgreSQL
database. This would be a good thing, as 
Postgres has the reputation of being a good
database, and is free software as well. This
would solve the licensing problems that prevent
many Linux distributors from including Midgard
into their releases.

Ami Ganguli (ami@ganguli.com) has volunteered
to initiate the effort, and is currently working
on documenting the internal Midgard API to make
the port easier. If you're interested in working
on this, please contact him directly or send 
email to the midgard-dev list.

  -> http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=midgard&m=95425525815782&w=2

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

Founding a Midgard nonprofit

The Midgard project has been growing steadily
over the last year, and now it could be a good 
point to organize a bit

We could found a nonprofit organization to handle
some aspects of this project. The benefits here would
be the ability to own property and handle donations 
without having to channel those through private 
contributors. The money would at first be going for
things like domains, but at a later point also
arranging training events and workshops would be
possible with this.
It could also clarify the copyright situation with the 
core Midgard libraries, as their ownership could be 
transferred to the organization. This would make the
software much safer to develop with.

The membership for the organization should be open
to all project contributors for free, and possibly
also to others for a nominal fee.

The current plans for this are founding the 
organization here in Finland where there is a nice
concentration of Midgard developers. Many of us also
have experience with organizing nonprofits here, so
getting things running shouldn't be too difficult.

As an initial plan, the name of the organization
would be The Midgard Project Ry (with Ry being short
for registered nonprofit in Finnish), and the board
would consist of Henri Bergius, Eero af Heurlin and
Jukka Zitting.

There is discussion on this going on currently in
the Midgard mailing list, and the thread can be
found from the archives.

  -> http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?t=95427405500003&w=2&r=1

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

Upcoming Midgard 1.4-beta3

The third beta of Midgard 1.4 should be
ready to be released soon. There are still
some issues, but those should be worked
out still during this week.

The new beta holds some interesting new
features, most important of those being
SiteGroups and Repligard.

SiteGroups is a new access control system
for Midgard that enables site administrators
to divide a Midgard server into multiple
site groups, each with their own administrators,
hosts, and everything. Essentially, this
will be to the site group members just like
they would have a Midgard server of their own.
This new feature should make Midgard much easier
to use for ISPs and hosting providers.

The other major addition, Repligard is a new
database replication utility for Midgard.
Repligard uses a XML file format for transferring
Midgard content between hosts. This isn't yet
the two-way replication that has been talked
about, but should already help people who are
running several Midgard servers, or want to
separate their development servers between
production ones.

Midgard 1.4-beta3 should be be out early next
week. Of course, being a beta, it won't be 
recommended for use on production servers.

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

Calendaring support beta

David Guerizec has released the first beta
of Midgard's inbuilt calendaring support.

The calendaring system has already been
available as a PHP-based prototype for
some time, but this release is the first
one where it is included in the Midgard
libraries.

The release is available as a patch against
the CVS version of Midgard, and should make
into the repository soon. If you have any 
questions about the release, please contact 
the Midgard developer mailing list.

It is still unclear whether calendaring
support will make it to the 1.4-beta3 
release.

  -> http://www.midgard-project.org/~emiliano/midgard-event.tar.gz

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

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 Today
   -> http://www.linuxtoday.com

 -Linux Developer's Network
   -> http://linuxdev.net

 -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