Topic: MIdgard for e-smith?

[Paul Newby]

I'm considering combining e-smith with a content publishing
tool called Midgard (http://www.midgard-project.org).  Midgard
requires Apache, MySQL and a patched version of PHP3.  For
a summary of Midgard's capabilities, see
http://www.midgard-project/article/884.html.

I'm very familiar with Midgard, but not e-smith.  Anyone
have any comments on the suitability of this combination?    

Paul N.

[Hasan Muhammad]

I am slightly familiar with Midgard and moderately familiar with e-smith.

I was able to load and configure Midgard 1.2.5 on top of e-smith v4.0.28 using the Installation Guide by Eddie Azman (more or less).

I was interested in being able to add new hosts via the e-smith GUI then using Midgard's Gui to configure and administer the hosts.

E-smith's GUI doesn't support port addressable virtual hosts, but I was able to configure them be hand editing the http.conf file.

E-smith's ibay facility does allow for host sites to be address by www.domain.com/hostname. I thought this would work well with Midgard's '/hostname' field in the host record.  I was able to get these two packages to cooperate in this fashion at least through seeing the hosts home page.  However, Midgard seemed to lose track of page referencing after navigating past the home page.

As you mentioned, Midgard is implemented with a patched version of PHP3.  The other php packages that I installed in the machine seemed to work okay with the patched version.  However, I needed some packages that required PHP4 so I gave up on Midgard for now.

Also, it seems that Midgard is now going to pursue a new direction with Midgard v2.0, and they are probably not going to fully document and fully support the interim versions (1.2.5 and 1.4).

I loved the idea of the Midgard package, and I would love to see it work well with  e-smith.

I love to hear your comments about the future of Midgard.

Hasan

[PaulNewby]

Hi Hasan,

Thanks for your comments.  I'll be configuring Midgard under
e-smith in the next couple of weeks and I'll keep your
observations in mind.

>   Also, it seems that Midgard is now going to pursue a new
> direction with Midgard v2.0, and they are probably
>  not going to fully document and fully support the interim
>  versions (1.2.5 and 1.4).

Now that Midgard has a strong commercial partner and more
resources, it seems that work on 2.0 is likely to accelerate;
however, I think the commitment to earlier versions is strong.  
There have been substantial improvements in documentation
of these versions recently and quite a lot of work has been
going into a new beta release of 1.4 (1.4b5).

Apparently a transition to PHP4 is also on the task list for the
final release of 1.4, scheduled for October.

Paul