From: "Ken Pooley" <kpooley@sewanee.edu>
To: "MWS" <mws@midgard-project.org>, <user@midgard-project.org>,
Subject: 
Date: Fri, 16 Feb 2001 14:28:48 -0600

Greetings!

The last few weeks have been quite eventful. 1.4.1 b1 was released and work
is progressing on a final release. Paris and Brussels were hives of Midgard
activity with LinuxWorld, OSDEM and the Midgard Developer’s meeting all
happening. All reports are that Alexander, Emile and Ami were excellent. In
Hong Kong Alan Knowles has released a second version of the Linux Center’s
excellent Framed Admin site. Lastly Henri has started a discussion, mostly
on the list, about the future role of the non-profit Midgard Ry which owns
the Midgard core code.


Contents:

Editor's Note

Developer’s Meeting and OSDEM
	Notes and pointers to pictures
1.4.1 Progress
	Beta 1 has been released, Beta 2
Framed Admin from HKLC
The Hong Kong Linux Center, at work in new offices on a new admin
application
The Future of the Ry
 There is some discussion what and who Midgard will be.



============================
Developer’s Meeting and OSDEM
----------------------------
The first weekend in February brought a public Midgard showing and the
semi-annual Midgard Developer’s Meeting. At OSDEM, in Brussels, Alexander
Bokovoy and Ami Ganguli made presentations about the recently released
Midgard 1.4 as well as the coming Midgard 2.0. Emile also sat in on one of
the round table discussions. Reports are that everyone represented the
Midgard community exceptionally well. There is a site with RealMedia
presentations of some of the conference sessions, I have not seen Ami,
Alexander or Emile but I am told that more content will be added. The URL is
http://www.opensource-tv.com .

February 5th saw the Midgard Developers meeting in Paris. In attendance were
Alexander, Emile, David, Ami, Jean-Noel, Loic, Armand and Henri.
Planning was set in place for the last 1.4 releases as well as more firm
planning for Midgard 2.0 planning. The road map for 2.0 has the final
release planned for the end of this calendar year. Basic application core
features should be finished by July, with optional features to be added over
July, August and September. In addition to immediate needs for help, the
developing group also needs to start hearing from people who have feature
requests, especially those which concern the enduser experience. Photos from
the meetings can be found at: http://bergie.envida.org/gallery/145.html


============================
1.4.1 Progress
----------------------------
1.4.1 Beta was released last week with the Final Candidate due in early
March. The main goal of 1.4.1 is to add Php4 support to Midgard. At this
point that part of the project looks promising; there are a few problems
Asgard and snippets but they seem to have more to do with differences
between Php3 and 4 than the Midgard application. There are also further
refinements to Repligard to look forward to. There will probably be one more
beta release for 1.4.1 then a final relese. The goal at this point is to
have one more planned release in the 1.4 tree for bug fixes only, 1.4.2 is
planned for April.
The 1.4.1 beta one can be downloaded from:
http://www.midgard-project.org/article/55582.html


============================
Framed Admin from HKLC
----------------------------
Alan Knowles announced the availability of the Hong Kong Linux Center’s
Framed Admin Release Milestone 2. This release includes bug fixes as well as
a number of new features. Most of the functionality is built into snippets
which can be removed if necessary.  There are modules for webmail, webstats
and multilingual features including a Chinese language version. The HKLC
Admin release has been a great addition to the Midgard community and has
done a great deal to expand what the Midgard experience can be. More
information can be found at:
http://www.hklc.com/projects/557.html

============================
The Future of the Ry
----------------------------
There have been important discussions on the Midgard list about the future
and form of the non profit entity which owns the Midgard code and associated
intellectual properties. Currently Midgard is owned by a nonprofit
organization, The Midgard Project Ry. This situation works, but there is
some thought about what more we could be accomplishing.
Changes in Php and its licensing are pushing Midgard from one side while the
promise of Midgard 2.0 with its independence from proprietary programming
languages pulls from the other side. There may or may not be a necessity of
change but the opportunity to re-examine the protection, control and
promotion of Midgard should not pass. One proposal would shift the ownership
of the copyright for Midgard to the Free Software Foundation. The idea would
be that this would free the Midgard Project organization to better represent
the business interests of the Midgard community membership. This, however,
could jeopardize the perception of impartiality of the association.  These
questions, basically,  revolve around what the community needs from the
official Midgard body and what the community can invest in the organization.
Input from the extended community would be welcomed and can be sent to the
list, if the discussion evolves there are a number of threaded forums we
might take advantage of, including Commentext, which would facilitate the
discussion.


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

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


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