Midgard (software)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Midgard CMS is an Open Source Content management system built on the Midgard Framework. Features include web-based authoring WYSIWYG interfaces and configurable XML workflow system. The Midgard Content Management Framework was initially released in May 1999, and has since gathered a sizable user and developer community. Midgard powers thousands of web sites ranging from simple organizational websites to major portals like New Zealand eGovernment site and Playbill.

Midgard is built on the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) platform. There is also a separate pure-PHP implementation for hosted environments and Windows systems called Midgard Lite.

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

History

Midgard Project was started in early 1998 by Jukka Zitting and Henri Bergius for a Finnish Historical reenactment organization Harmaasudet a system for them to publish their material online.

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 8th 1999. 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 commercial application for the platform was HKLC's Nadmin Studio content management system.

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

Licensing

The Midgard core libraries 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 Linux C libraries. This licensing scheme qualifies Midgard as Free software developed with an Open Source model.

The Midgard-based administration tools and usage examples in the Midgard packages are distributed under the GNU General Public License (GPL). These include Aegir, SpiderAdmin, MidCOM and the MidCOM example site.

Official Documentation is licensed under the Creative Commons License which supports the free usage principles defined by the GPL for code.

Applications developed using the Midgard PHP, Java and XML-RPC interfaces (APIs) can be copyrighted and licensed under any terms by their authors, enabling creation of commercial products and solutions based on the platform.

See also

• List of content management systems

External links

• Midgard Project site
• Midgard Documentation Wiki
• An external Wiki with Midgard Documentation