To access the template system just click Folder > Edit layout template in the Midgard toolbar:

This will take you into Asgard, the Midgard administration interface. There you'll be shown what elements are used by the components running on your site:

Clicking on an element name will let you create it. Then you'll be shown the default contents of that element to make overriding them easier. The language used in the templates is obviously PHP:

When you save your element it will replace the component's default output in the folders using that particular style. You can also do nice things like including contents from another page using Dynamic Loading.

What about file attachments?

Asgard also allows you to add files (images, CSS, javascript, whatever) to your template. To do this click the Attachments button when you're in the style. There you'll be able to manage existing file attachments and to add new ones:

If you're dealing with a text-based file (CSS, javascript, XML, ...) Asgard will also allow you to edit it directly on the web:

...and finally when you're done with your file and want to use it in some of your templates, the URL is available easily from the interface:

The new version looks quite nice and fresh. Notice the privacy information on the right-hand side, which is relevant as Qaiku allows channels and profiles that are private or invitation-only:

Technically the new version is also remarkable as it is the first major website to run fully on top of the legacy-free Midgard2 platform. So yes, every entry you see there is a GObject. And D-Bus signals fly when you post.

On to the challenge, then

To highlight Qaiku's threading, conversational nature I started a new "On my travels, I have" thread for sharing your most extraordinary travel experiences. This is not on Twitter or Buzz as with Qaiku it is so easy to keep the conversation together and accessible for the future as well.

To contribute, sign up on Qaiku, go to the thread and add your experiences as a comment. If you have a link or picture to include, you can also do so. My first entry was:

seen ice descend from the heavens and provide us with cold beer on a hot day in Lesotho

Will be interesting to see what comes out of this :-)

The idea of a content repository is that instead of coming up with new, isolated file formats or database setups for your application you can just work with objects and signals, and let Midgard handle the rest. This is something that lots of people are doing with CouchDB as well, but we feel Midgard, with its light footprint and native APIs for languages like Python, C, Vala and PHP fits better in the mobile applications context.

Installing Midgard

Midgard packages are available for many different Linux distributions through the OpenSuse Build Service. To find the right repository for your setup, go to the OBS project page. For example, on my Ubuntu Karmic netbook the URL to add to apt sources.list is deb http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/midgardproject:/mjolnir/xUbuntu_9.10/ ./. Then I just:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install python-midgard2

Midgard is also available in Maemo extras and for OS X on MacPorts.

Defining a schema

The first thing when developing a Midgard application is to define your storage objects. This is done using the MgdSchema XML format. In this case we're doing a simple "attendee" object that amends Midgard's built-in person record with information related to the conference:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<Schema xmlns="http://www.midgard-project.org/repligard/1.4">
    <type name="openbossa_attendee" table="openbossa_attendee">
        <property name="id" type="unsigned integer" primaryfield="id">
            <description>Local non-replication-safe database identifier</description>
        </property>
        <property name="person" type="unsigned integer" link="midgard_person:id">
            <description>Person attending the event</description>
        </property>
        <property name="registration" type="datetime">
            <description>Registration date of the attendee</description>
        </property>
        <property name="likesbeer" type="boolean">
            <description>Whether the attendee likes beer</description>
        </property>
    </type>
</Schema>

Then we just save this XML file into /usr/share/midgard2/schema/ so that Midgard will find it.

Initiating the repository connection

Once the MgdSchema is in place it is time to import antigravity and start hacking in Python. The code works pretty much in the same way in other languages Midgard is available for, but Python is used here for the sake of simplicity. First we load the Midgard extension:

import _midgard as midgard

Then we setup the repository connection. With these settings we will store our content into an SQLite database located in ~/.midgard2/data/midgardexample.db:

configuration = midgard.config()
configuration.dbtype = 'SQLite'
configuration.database = 'midgardexample'

# Open a Midgard repository connection with our config
connection = midgard.connection()
connection.open_config(configuration)

As this is the first time we're interacting with the repository we need to tell Midgard to prepare the storage for itself and also for our new openbossa_attendee class:

midgard.storage.create_base_storage()
midgard.storage.create_class_storage('midgard_person')
midgard.storage.create_class_storage('midgard_parameter')
midgard.storage.create_class_storage('openbossa_attendee')

Interacting with data

First we create a person object with our attendee:

person = midgard.mgdschema.midgard_person()
person.firstname = 'Leif'
person.lastname = 'Eriksson'
person.create()

Then we create our attendee object and link that with the person we just created:

attendee = midgard.mgdschema.openbossa_attendee()
attendee.person = person.id
attendee.likesbeer = True
attendee.create()

Querying data

Later we'll want to find out about all Leifs attending the event. We do this by using the Midgard query builder:

qb = midgard.query_builder('openbossa_attendee')
qb.add_constraint('person.firstname', '=', 'Leif')
attendees = qb.execute()

The query builder returns us a list of matching attendee objects. We can go through them and also fetch the associated persons:

for attendee in attendees:
    person = midgard.mgdschema.midgard_person()
    person.get_by_id(attendee.person)
    if attendee.likesbeer:
        print "%s, %s is attending the event" % (person.lastname, person.firstname)

Then we can update the persons with their email addresses:

    person.email = 'leif@vinland.no'
    person.update()

For basic data handling, that's it! When you need more, you can extend objects with file attachments or parameters. You can also create joined records using Midgard views. Midgard provides D-Bus signals, transactions, centralized metadata, synchronization and many other things.

The answer is, we use an open-source platform called "Midgard." We picked it nearly ten years ago, and it has held up fairly well.
...

One of the things we like about Midgard actually makes it rather unsuitable for many simpler publishing scenarios: it is highly object-oriented. This allows us to run multiple sites off largely a single codebase -- at the cost of quite user-unfriendly administrative and authoring facilities.

Also, Midgard is very much a development platform, and we have had to create a fair amount of custom code, especially to handle structured content. In that regard, our CMS experience probably resemble yours. As an industry we remain very far from plug-and-play content management technology for all but the simplest of websites.

While the post contains many negative points about older Midgard (the UIs are a bit better now than they used to be, quite a lot of development has since been happening especially in the LTS branch), it is remarkable that CMS Watch has been able to run their services through the same CMS setup for ten years. This really shows the durability and commitment to long-term stability we have in the Midgard community. We've been doing this for more than ten years, and will likely keep going for quite a bit longer.

As for usability and popularity of Midgard, there is quite little we can do about it in the Midgard1 area, as that is now in long-term support phase that won't allow major changes. But Midgard2 is a new world with new opportunities. Midgard's content repository is pretty much there already, as is the MVC layer, and this spring we should be able to unveil the new, quite revolutionary CMS concept as well. Watch this blog for updates!

First of all, go to meego.com and click login:

Select the "Log in using OpenID" option, and provide your maemo.org OpenID URL:

Then the request will be redirected to maemo.org where the site will check your credentials and ask whether to relay your information on to meego.com:

And that's it, suddenly you can use your maemo.org account with meego.com!

The same OpenID provider component can also be utilized on any other Midgard-powered website.

Here are some other submissions I made:

The idea behind the Midgard content repository is that instead of coming up with your own file formats you can just keep working with objects and signals, and let the repository deal with the rest.

It is always fun to go to Brazil and meet the vibrant free software community there. The plan is to fly over this weekend, spend a few days in Sao Paulo and then head for the Amazon. Feel free to ping me if you're around.

Unlike Android, both Moblin and Maemo stacks have been very promising in the sense that they've been closely aligned with existing and well-known Linux desktop technologies. All RPC communications happen through D-Bus, Qt or Clutter is used as the GUI toolkit, there is Telepathy for integrated VoIP and IM communications, and Moblin even comes with the GeoClue location service.

So far the discussion about this merge has very much focused on technical terms: what toolkit to use (Qt is recommended), what package manager (RPM) and so forth. However, what hasn't been discussed yet is what will happen to Maemo's excellent infrastructure for community involvement:

• Brainstorm is a tool for proposing ideas and solutions to them, and then voting to qualify them. This is a very good way to gather ideas and feedback from the community, and some brainstorms have even ended up having community-led free implementations available, freeing Nokia from having to write all platform functionality
• Talk is the very popular forum for both Maemo end users and developers. Having an open forum to discuss it all, and having also people from Nokia and Intel there would help to communicate the aims and decisions around the platform a lot better
• Packages and Downloads provide a fully open and crowdsourced "app store experience" where the community is free to develop, upload and install Maemo applications through a consistent service that provides quality control, nice installers and a free API for browsing the software available
• Community Council and the Sprint process have been the way Maemo's community infrastructure has been designed and developed out in the open. The various tasks have been documented in the Wiki, and people have been able to follow the progress through a Qaiku workstream
• Karma is a way to credit community members for their involvement. The involvement can be technical (for instance, developing a popular Maemo application) or social (publishing popular blog posts or helping people on Talk), and has been used as a criteria for Community Council and other elections. Karma also helps Nokia to qualify community members, to find the people who should have access the developer devices for instance. In a large community it is hard to identify the people who are just loud and the people who are doing actual valuable contributions from each other without such tools
• Social News and Planet are a way for the community to aggregate and promote important posts around the project. We look at things like social bookmarking, blog links and votes happening on the Maemo site to determine the most important stories of the day, to provide an "automatic newspaper" for the project

Providing all or some of these services as part of the MeeGo infrastructure would enable the community to feel involvement, and even ownership in the new project that is shaping up. This is critical for a project that has such a big reliance on new innovation and connectivity with the upstream, especially at the time of such big change.

This is another case of location context being used to serve users better. To figure out where the user is coming from the site uses a combination of IP positioning and browser geolocation, while weather information comes from Foreca's feeds. Map visualization uses CloudMade's OpenStreetMap-based maps. And of course the whole thing runs on the stable Ragnaroek series of Midgard.

In other news, Jos et jaksa is another pretty interesting recent site launch, especially for the fact that it is the first-ever website running on the legacy-free Midgard2 platform and Midgard MVC.

Like the first iPhone, iPad 1.0 is a John the Baptist preparing the way of what is to come, but also like iPhone 1.0 (and Jokanaan himself too come to that) iPad 1.0 is still fantastic enough in its own right to be classed as a stunningly exciting object, one that you will want NOW and one that will not be matched this year by any company. In the future, when it has two cameras for fully featured video conferencing, GPS and who knows what else built in (1080 HD TV reception and recording and nano projection, for example) and when the iBook store has recorded its 100 millionth download and the thousands of accessories and peripherals that have invented uses for iPad that we simply can’t now imagine – when that has happened it will all have seemed so natural and inevitable that today’s nay-sayers and sceptics will have forgotten that they ever doubted its potential.

The success of iPad will mean more than just a completely new level of App Store economy. Other companies will certainly seek to emulate the model, coming up with their own post-WIMP devices and their own content and software ecosystems. This all will be a challenge for the free software movement.

The world of free software is still very much stuck in what computing was in the 90s. We think of desktop computers, we do not integrate with the web. And we do not get the transformation that is happening with personal computers. Taught by smartphones and cloud applications, users are moving from desktops through simple netbooks towards information appliances.

With information appliances you need a seamless user interface. You need an ecosystem where content comes alongside the software to utilize it. You need to move past the old WIMP metaphors and the idea of separation between data stored in a a file system and the software manipulating it.

So far the first convincing attempt towards this direction I've seen in the free software world is KDE's Social Desktop initiative. It allows users to connect with each other straight through the desktop, and it allows discovery of new applications and content to download and use straight in the applications. We also use it with Maemo's new App Downloader.

Threatened by the cloud from one end, and closed-ecosystem appliances from the other, it will be interesting to see how we react. Will we rise to the challenge and start providing new user experiences? Will we build a free cloud? Will we integrate with initiatives like Project Gutenberg and Creative Commons to provide the content integration? Will the open web be our safe haven?

Definitely interesting times to be a software developer.

If you’re thinking The Tablet is just a big iPhone, or just Apple’s take on the e-reader, or just a media player, or just anything, I say you’re thinking too small — the equivalent of thinking that the iPhone was going to be just a click wheel iPod that made phone calls. I think The Tablet is nothing short of Apple’s reconception of personal computing.

What I find most interesting are the view that the Tablet may bring new computer interaction paradigms. Again from Daring Fireball:

Our “desktop” computers’ human interfaces haven’t fundamentally changed since 1984 — keyboard and mouse/trackpad for input, overlapping draggable resizable windows on-screen, and a hierarchical file system where you create and manage “document files”. Have you ever sat back, scratched your chin, and wondered when the computer industry will break free of these current interfaces — which can be a hassle even for experts, and downright confusing (e.g. click vs. double-click) for the non-experts? Surely no one expects the computer interfaces of, say, 50 years hence to be based on these same metaphors and input methods. What’s the next step?

A touchscreen tablet isn't really suited for the WIMP paradigm as for example text entry is quite difficult, and you probably want larger, thumb-friendly user interface elements. This is where Microsoft's Tablet PC initiative failed, trying to bring the regular WIMP user interface to the tablet.

Instead what seems to be happening is that all the Wiis, iPhones, and N900s are now heading us towards a post-WIMP world. Instead of indirect manipulation by mouse and keyboard we can now interact with our applications using the more natural ways of touching things on screen or moving the device around.

This innovation will not be limited only to mobile APIs, web applications can already now know whether user is accessing them via a WIMP system or a touchscreen device thanks to CSS media queries and Javascript orientation events in latest Firefox.

The user interface innovation that is arriving thanks to these new interaction possibilities is quite promising, though it will probably take a while before we know what things actually work, and what are just fun demos.

If you're thinking about new kinds of user interfaces, it might be a good time to read papers like Noncommand User Interfaces (Jakob Nielsen, 1993) and Magic Ink (Bret Victor, 2006).

I certainly am as we are in the process of defining a new kind of CMS UI for Midgard 2.

Update: Gizmodo has a very nice article on Jef Raskin's information appliance concept and the evolution of GUIs.

The idea is quite good: to replace business directories like Yelp or eat.fi with something that is easily accessible from Google's homepage and uses Google's great relevancy algorithms.

However, the implementation is not quite there yet. My main gripe is that they implemented this using browser sniffing so that the feature can be accessed only with iPhones and Android devices. Even though I'm using N900, a mobile device that has GPS and provides geolocation through the browser I cannot access that site. That reeks of the bad old times of IE-only websites.

Lesson: if you need browser sniffing to provide some feature, implement it based on browser capabilities, not the user agent (which can anyway be spoofed easily).

• Midgard2 finally became a reality, bringing us a fully legacy-free modern Midgard implementation. There were two releases: 9.03 Vinland and 9.09 Mjolnir. Midgard2 works just fine also in desktop applications and mobile devices like the Nokia N900
• Ragnaroek, the long-term support version of Midgard1 kept chugging along with four new maintenance releases and total of 566 issues closed. Ragnaroek will be maintained until October 2013
• The Midgard Project turned ten years old in May. A gala evening and party was held in Helsinki, Finland
• Midgard's content repository gained bindings to two new programming languages alongside existing PHP, C and Python: Objective-C in March and Vala in December
• Midgard was one of the CMSs admitted to the EU-funded Interactive Knowlegde project that aims to increase semantic capabilities in content management
• Qaiku, a conversational microblogging platform powered by Midgard MVC was launched in March
• We had two Midgard Gatherings: in March in Linköping, Sweden and in October in Helsinki, Finland
• Ragnaland became a way to bridge the gap between Midgard1 and Midgard2 by enabling running of MidCOM applications on top of Midgard MVC
• Midgard was presented in several conferences including Gran Canaria Desktop Summit, FrOSCon, OpenMind and FSCONS
• Founding meeting for an association to support the Midgard project was held in December. The association will provide membership to all active Midgard contributors, and an alumni membership for people who have been part of the project in the past

Happy new year to everybody in the Midgard world!

The current Finnish team includes Otto Kekäläinen of VALO-CD, the distribution of free software applications for Windows as the country coordinator, and Henri Bergius of Midgard as the deputy coordinator. Timo Jyrinki from Ubuntu Finland is the translation coordinator. Here you can see the team in a recent info event organized together with the Finnish Linux User Group and TKO-äly:

While COSS is already doing important work for free software in Finland, FSFE amends that agenda by providing focus on the freedom of software and citizen-level participation.

If you're interested in contributing to software freedom, start by joining the Fellowship of the FSFE. You can also contact us at finland@fsfeurope.org and find out more about what is happening in Finland in the field of free software by following the vapaasuomi.fi website.

So far a problem with ping.fm has been that it doesn't support Qaiku, the conversational microblogging tool that we're using to handle workstreaming in Maemo.org Sprints. But now it is possible thanks to the Custom URL functionality on ping.fm.

If you already have a Qaiku account you can start posting to it via ping.fm in the following way:

1. Enable Qaiku API in your settings and copy the API key
2. Register to ping.fm
3. Add a Custom URL to send statuses to
   
4. Enter the URL http://www.qaiku.com/api/statuses/update.json?apikey=xx where xx is your API key as the Custom URL
   
5. Testing posting via the ping.fm web interface:
   
6. See your new post on Qaiku:
   
7. If you want to post to a channel, just begin your message with #channelname

If ping.fm is not your thing, there are also other non-web ways to use Qaiku. For example Mauku for N900 and Gwibber for the Linux desktop work nicely with the service. Qaiku also has an XMPP bot that you can use by simply adding qaiku@jabber.org as your instant messaging contact.

But to be really easy, the framework you're using should provide user's location built-in, without you as an application developer having to think about it. This is the reason for Midgard's geolocation features to exist, after all. With Midgard, getting user's location is quite easy:

Midgard MVC (Midgard 9.09)

// Read location from session or user's location log
$user_location = midgardmvc_helper_location_user::get_location();
if (is_null($user_location))
{
    // No location found, try to geocode based on user IP via the GeoPlugin service
    $geocoder = new new midgardmvc_helper_location_geocoder_geoplugin()
    $location_parameters = array('ip' => $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']);
    try
    {
        $user_location = $geocoder->geocode($location_parameters);
        midgardmvc_helper_location_user::set_location($user_location);
    }
    catch (Exception $e)
    {
        // Couldn't get location from IP
    }
}

if (!is_null($user_location))
{
    echo sprintf('You\'re in %s, %s', $user_location->latitude, $user_location->longitude);
    // Will print "You're in 60.1633, 24.9279"
}

MidCOM (Midgard 8.09)

<?php
// Read location from session or user's location log
$user_location = org_routamc_positioning_user::get_location();
if (is_null($user_location))
{
    // No location found, try to geocode based on user IP
    $geocoder = org_routamc_positioning_geocoder::create('geoplugin');
    $location_parameters = array('ip' => $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']);
    $user_location = $geocoder->geocode($location_parameters);
    if (!is_null($user_location))
    {
        // Store geocoded location to session or user's location log
        org_routamc_positioning_user::set_location($user_location);
    }
}

if (!is_null($user_location))
{
    echo sprintf('You\'re in %s, %s', $user_location['latitude'], $user_location['longitude']);
    // Will print "You're in 60.1633, 24.9279"
}
?>

The examples above will work with both anonymous site visitors (using sessions) and registered users (using Midgard's position log). In this example we check if location is already available via browser geolocation or some importer like Qaiku or Fire Eagle, and if not we fall back to IP-based positioning using the GeoPlugin service. The resulting user location array or object (depending on Midgard used) contains a textual description of the place and accuracy information in addition to WGS-84 coordinates.

This is built on top of the excellent FirePHP extension, which helps you get data not only from regular web pages but also from AJAX requests.

Currently we send all logged information plus details about current route and templates being used. To use this, install FirePHP in your Firefox, FirePHPCore from PEAR packages, and enable development_mode in MidCOM3 configuration.

I'm considering to port this also to Ragnaroek.

Web Content Repositories are more than just plain old relational databases. In fact, the requirements that arise when managing web content have led to a class of content repository implementations that are comparable on a conceptual level. During the IKS community workshop in Rome we got together to compare JCR (the Jackrabbit implementation) and Midgard's content repository. While in some cases the terminology might be different, many of the underlying ideas are identical. So we came up with a list of common traits and features of our content repositories. For comparison, there is also Apache CouchDB.

So, why use a Content Repository for your application instead of the old familiar RDBMS? Repositories provide several advantages:

• Common rules for data access mean that multiple applications can work with same content without breaking consistency of the data

• Signals about changes let applications know when another application using the repository modifies something, enabling collaborative data management between apps

• Objects instead of SQL mean that developers can deal with data using APIs more compatible with the rest of their desktop programming environment, and without having to fear issues like SQL injection

• Data model is scriptable when you use a content repository, meaning that users can easily write Python or PHP scripts to perform batch operations on their data without having to learn your storage format

• Synchronization and sharing features can be implemented on the content repository level meaning that you gain these features without having to worry about them

In addition to being a GObject-powered content repository for PHP, Python and Objective-C, the Mjolnir release provides several significant goodies on top of the older Midgard2 series:

• MgdSchema Views provide a way to define joined data types
• MgdSchema types can be extended with subclasses and additional information
• Transactions are available for storage engines that support them
• New authentication API provides support for different types like OpenID and OAuth
• ...and there are a lot more unit tests, helping to safeguard against regressions

We've been testing running the Qaiku microblogging service with Mjolnir. The exactly same PHP code that we used with Midgard 8.09 LTS performs 20-60% better when running on Mjolnir.

Get Midgard2 9.09 Mjolnir while it is hot! Builds for various Linux distributions are already starting to hit OBS repositories...