Midgard (software)

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Midgard
The Midgard Project

AJAX inline editing of content in Midgard
Developer(s) The Midgard Community
Stable release 8.09.5 / 2009-04-27; 2 months ago
Operating system Linux, Unix and Mac OS X
Type Content Management Framework
License LGPL
Website http://www.midgard-project.org/

Midgard is an open source persistent storage framework. It provides an object-oriented and replicated environment for building data-intensive applications.

Midgard also ships with MidCOM content management system (CMS) built on the Midgard framework[1]. MidCOM's features include web-based authoring WYSIWYG interfaces and a component interface for installing additional web functionalities[2].

Midgard is built on the GNOME stack of libraries like GLib and libgda, and has language bindings for C, Python, Objective-C and PHP[3]. Communications between applications written in the different languages happen over D-Bus. The CMS functionalities run on the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) platform[4].

The project follows the synchronized, 6 month release cycle that is implemented by several major open source projects like Ubuntu and GNOME[5]. Because of this, the version numbering reflects to year and month of a release. The version 8.09 Ragnaroek has been designated as a "Long Term Support" release[6].

Contents

[edit] Etymology

The name Midgard comes from Nordic mythology, meaning Middle earth, the world of humans. Most of the Midgard developer community comes from the Baltic region,[7] and the project has been referred by CMS Watch as the Hanseatic League of Content Management[8].

[edit] History

Midgard Project was started in early 1998 by Jukka Zitting and Henri Bergius for a Finnish historical reenactment organizationHarmaasudet— as a system for them to publish their material online.[9]

Since the organization didn't have resources to maintain a large development project by itself, the open source model was chosen for creating a community of contributors to the system. The version 1.0 of Midgard was released to the public on May 8, 1999[10]. It attracted a steady stream of users, and the development project flourished.

Commercial services for the platform started to appear in early 2000. One of the first adopters was Envida, a Dutch company that realized the potential of Midgard for Web hosting purposes. First proprietary application for the platform was Hong Kong Linux Center (HKLC) Nadmin Studio content management system[11].

First application not connected with content management was Nemein.Net, a Professional Services Automation application released in 2002 by Nemein, a Finnish Midgard company[12]. In May 2004 the Nemein.Net suite was renamed to OpenPSA and released under Open Source licensing[13].

By 2009, some social web services, like Qaiku have also adopted Midgard as their content management platform.

[edit] Licensing

The Midgard core libraries and the MidCOM CMS are distributed under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL), a license which permits the software to be freely used so long as it is dynamically linked or the user can relink it to new versions of the libraries. This is the same license used by the GNU C Library. This licensing scheme qualifies Midgard as free software developed with an open source model.

Official documentation is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License which supports the free usage principles defined by the GPL for code.

Applications developed using the Midgard application programming interfaces (API) can be copyrighted and licensed under any terms by their authors, enabling creation of commercial products and services based on the platform.

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ "MidCOM". http://www.midgard-project.org/documentation/midcom/. Retrieved on 2009-05-14. 
  2. ^ "MidCOM components". http://www.midgard-project.org/documentation/midcom-components/. Retrieved on 2009-05-14. 
  3. ^ "Midgard 2: more than just PHP, more than just CMS". http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/midgard_2-more_than_just_php-more_than_just_cms/. Retrieved on 2009-05-14. 
  4. ^ "Midgard Lights An Open-Source LAMP". http://www.cmswatch.com/Feature/48-Midgard-1.4. Retrieved on 2009-05-14. 
  5. ^ "Midgard and synchronized releases". http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/midgard_and_synchronized_releases/. Retrieved on 2009-14-05. 
  6. ^ "Ragnaroek LTS". http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/long-term_support_for_midgard-ragnaroek_is_here/. Retrieved on 2009-05-14. 
  7. ^ "Midgard: Developer locations: Midgard Developer Locations". http://www.midgard-project.org/midcom-permalink-5733d7628684303c3bd2a401a6f100d5. Retrieved on 2009-04-25. 
  8. ^ "Web Content Management Marketplace Circa 2005". http://www.cmswatch.com/Feature/119-CMS-Marketplace. Retrieved on 2009-05-14. 
  9. ^ "Jukka Zitting: Midgard: Where it all began". http://jukkaz.wordpress.com/2009/05/10/midgard-where-it-all-began/. Retrieved on 2009-05-14. 
  10. ^ "Midgard 1.0.0 released". http://www.linuxtoday.com/developer/1999050701705NWSW. Retrieved on 2009-05-14. 
  11. ^ "The State of Midgard - August 2001". http://lwn.net/2001/0809/a/midgard.php3. Retrieved on 2009-05-14. 
  12. ^ "Nemein.Net 1.8 brings enhanced project tracking for consulting companies". http://lwn.net/Articles/9535/. Retrieved on 2009-05-14. 
  13. ^ "OpenPSA 1.9.0 Released - Open Source Management Software for Consultancies". http://www.midgard-project.org/updates/2004-05-08-000/. Retrieved on 2009-05-14. 

[edit] External links

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