Do It Yourself
By Brian Wilson
I'm evaluating open-source content management systems for a nonprofit site with well-meaning, but inexperienced, volunteer content authors. Last month, I looked at Zope. This month, the saga continues as I configure my server to run Midgard, a content-management system. Midgard supports online magazines with article management, and event and calendar management. It also includes built-in support for user and group accounts. Via a command line program called Repligard, Midgard lets you develop content on a separate staging server and publish articles on a public server. Midgard 1.4 includes Asgard as its Web-based server management component; in earlier versions Asgard was an optional add-on. For background information on Midgard, read Brian Jepson's May 2000 article, "Data-Drive Sites with Midgard."
Midgard 1.4 is basically an upgrade from the 1.25 version, and should be the final 1.x release. The 2.0 beta will probably be released by May and is a complete rewrite. Version 1.4 added Repligard and Asgard as standard features. And it has features to better support multiple virtual hosts and serve data from the file system as well as from SQL databases.
Whereas the Zope application server is an end-to-end solution with its own built-in Web, FTP, and database servers, Midgard is made for the do-it-yourself alpha geek. Before you can fire up Midgard for the first time, you must install and configure PHP, Apache, MySQL, and—optionally—OpenSSL.
