Date: Wed, 31 May 2000 08:56:47 -0700 (PDT)
From:  <parker@momma.mi-recordz.com>
To: midgard@greywolves.org, lwn@lwn.net, marty@linuxtoday.com, 
Subject: MWSvol40

Greetings!

MWS for 31st of May, 2000 (#40)


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

Current versions:
        Stable: 1.2.5 'Mad King'
        Devel.: 1.4beta.3
	Oracle: 1.2.5 Oracle 8i

----------------------------
============================
This weeks article on PageLinks was written by David Guerizec and I. It
should demonstrate how a programmer and a writer can work together to
produce documentation that's usable in more than one forum. Related
specifically to Midgard, we'll extract parts of this article to build the
Midgard Manual PageLinks chapter.

Please email me at
parker@mi-recordz.com

Thank you

Ron Parker

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

French Start-up to assist in Midgard Development, Packaging, Marketing

French business start-up Aurora, has expressed an interest in assisting
with the development of the Open Source, LGPL Midgard application server.
Jean-Philippe Brunon, representitive for Aurora, stated in his initial
post to the Midgard mailing list that Aurora is interested in contributing
to the 1.4 stable branch by helping with documentation and improving
installation and packaging. Upon completing the 1.4 branch, Brunon stated
that Aurora will lend it's resources to designing and developing the 2.0
branch.

Aurora is interested in paying Midgard developers to work full-time on the
project. "Aurora wants to help Midgard," said Brunon. "They (developers)
would remain completely independent and relocating is not required."

When asked about his thoughts concerning Aurora's role in the Midgard
developments, Henri Bergius, Midgard co-founder, said "I think they
(Aurora) are pretty much doing the right things. I see their plan as
becoming the Red Hat for Midgard," said Bergius. "There are many good
examples on how this can be made to work well in the Linux circles. Take
Red Hat or VA for example. Their (Aurora) staff is rather fanatical about
free software issues."

"There's always going to be a certain level of tension between the market
requirements of a commercial outfit and the 'grassroots' off-time OSS
team," said Emiliano Heyns, official maintainer of the 2.0 branch. "I
think Aurora has the right mindset as a company to balance the concerns."

"Aurora can potentially bring many more users," said Heyns. "More users
means more exposure and feature requests that might enable us to spot a
pattern which can in turn help to articulate a development path. More
exposure will bring more criticism, and I welcome it. The Midgard roadmap
notwithstanding, we've been adding features pretty much as the developers
fancy strikes them."

According to Brunon's initial post to the mailing list, the Aurora
developers are interested in taking part in the design of the 2.0 branch.
"Midgard should be more modular, so it could be possible to develop
various components using the Midgard environment without having to add
those components in the Midgard development branch," said Brunon. 

Emiliano Heyns said, "The current implementation is severly limited in its
scalability. The core itself should only be infrastructure: security,
storage, user management, content traversal/access. Anything else, even
the topic/article system, should be an application on top of that and
should be outside the core. These applications could be implemented in C,
or maybe PHP, but they should be outside the core."

"The Midgard 2.0 branch is designed to become a more independent and
modular release by allowing users to specify which scripting languages
they'd like to use. Midgard 2.0 has a goal to be separated from the
scripting engine in order to use several scripting languages based on the
user's selection," said Alexander Bokovoy, official maintainer of the 1.4
branch. "Modularity is a keystone and it means security,
internationalization and simplicity."

Alexander Bokovoy named Source Exchange (collab.net), founded by Brian
Behlendor, co-founder of the Apache Software Foundation and O'Reilly &
Associates, as an example of a company that brings open source developers
and commercial companies together. The news page on their site lists a
number of stories where the open source community is developing
applications for commercial businesses.

Bokovoy stated that there's a new project in Russia which sells an
Application Server starting at $10,000. "The project itself is very
simple," said Bokovoy. "Midgard would simply beat it but, we don't have a
(business) plan or a description for business men who make decisions."

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

PageLinks

David Guerizec, Midgard developer, has developed a solution called
PageLinks which facilitates the linking of an arbitrary page to another
page. "They (PageLinks) are like symbolic links under unix," said
Guerizec. "The links allow you to 
reference a page that could exist in another page tree, or on another
host."

PageLinks can be used to create links between pages from unrelated sites.
The sites must be members of the same SiteGroup and database.

If you build a PageLink between www.animals.com/cats/ and
www.petfood.com/products/cannedfood/ the subsequent PageLink will be
www.animals.com/cats/newpage/ where /newpage/ contains the data from
www.petfood.com/products/cannedfood/. Of course, newpage can be assigned
any name.

Additionaly, in a future version, PageLinks will perform dynamic linking
of
pages determined by the group that the user belongs to. For example, these
PageLinks can lead to the group's private zone within an intranet or an
extranet. So, when a graphic designer accesses the admin pages for
www.animals.com/admin/ they see the style administration pages while
writers are given access to the content administration pages during their
visit to the same url. This means that mod_midgard can retreive user
information while the Midgard Apache module walks through the URL path.

PageLink Description:
sourcepage -> pagelink -> targetpage Each page has a name but in the
resulting url, you'll only see: /sourcepage/pagelink/ although you'll be
on targetpage.

For example, if you have a page 'kitkat' located at
www.cats.com/products/food/kitkat/ and you want to promote 'kitkat', from
www.vetenarians.com, you can put an href on a page to a pagelink called
'promotions' that links back to the page kitkat. The resulting url is
/www.vetenarians.com/promotions/.

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

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 own 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

 -LinuxProgramming
   -> http://www.linuxprogramming.com

 -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

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