We had a 19-hour hacking session last Friday with Arttu, Rambo and Jerry to build new “general Midgard admin UI” targeted at replacing Aegir and Spider Admin with something that follows both MgdSchema and MidCOM DBA rules and APIs, and so is compatible with Midgard 2.

Now it can:

• Browse trees of any (properly configured) MgdSchema objects
• View and edit any MgdSchema object with an autogenerated "semi-smart" DM2 schema
• Manage linked fields between various types using Universal Chooser (search-based selection)
• Delete objects (without tree awareness so far)
• Create new objects under existing objects (not yet root-level objects)
• Manage metadata and parameters

You could see this as a continuation with Tarjei’s Aegir2 ideas, but with three significant differences:

• Now Midgard provides much better information via the reflector APIs for building trees and schemas
• Asgard is a single component instead of bunch of components to keep installation easy
• The user interface has been designed to degrade gracefully for text-based browsers

There is still much work to do, but I think generally it can already be used to replace Spider to some degree. To try it out you need to install 1.8.4 from the developer tarballs, install MidCOM from SVN and then go to http://www.example.net/__mfa/asgard/object/edit/GUID/

If our plans succeed, Asgard will be the default administrative interface in Midgard 1.9 series.

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