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