Linux Center (HK) Ltd. has moved the popular Nadmin Studio content management product and its successor, Aegir CMS under the GNU General Public License (GPL). The GPL licensing provides users rights to use, modify and distribute the software as long as the source code is kept available and modifications to the application given back to the development community. The licensing change also removes restrictions on providing commercial services on the CMS platform, allowing more companies to enter the market.

Nadmin Studio was a popular Content Management System originally developed by HKLC for small and mid-sized websites and organizations. In late 2002 Nadmin Studio was renamed to Aegir CMS and moved to the maintenance of an international developer community.

Aegir CMS runs on top of the Midgard Content Management Framework built on the Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP (LAMP) platform. Midgard powers thousands of websites ranging from small organizational websites (www.luottokunta.fi) to major portals like New Zealand eGovernment site (www.govt.nz) and Playbill (www.playbill.com).

Core features of Aegir CMS include:

• MS Word -compatible content editor
  • Easy publishing environment for non-technical users
  • Requires MS Internet Explorer 5.01+ or Mozilla 1.3+
• Group-based workflow settings
  • Different roles: Designers (layout), Developers (logic and structure), Authors (content production), Editors (content approval and publication)
  • Roles are based on group settings and ownership of different content areas
  • Power users have access to revision control (RCS) and moving content objects
• Staging/live setup
  • Prepare you site changes in staging environment, test and finally publish to live site when ready
  • Use scheduled publication or publish to site immediately
• Multi-company hosting (ASP) support
  • Each company is assigned to their own virtual database
  • User interface can be customized to support ASP provider’s brand
  • ChangeLogs system provides easy way to publish system notices
• Multilingual support
  • Aegir CMS ships with several languages including English, Finnish, French, German, Japanese, Polish, Spanish and Russian
  • Sites can be managed using several character sets, including Unicode
• Flexible templating and layout system
  • Layout templates can be generated from multiple elements gathered from the site style and the page tree
• Full Midgard Content Management framework
  • Easy and documented object-oriented PHP programming interface
  • Separation of content, layout and site logic
  • Efficient content management using a hierarchical topic and article tree
  • Flexible attachment of metadata and files to all content objects
  • Support for different languages and character sets including Unicode
  • Replication and packaging utilities

More information:

• Aegir CMS - http://www.aegir-cms.org/
• Midgard - http://www.midgard-project.org/
• HKLC - http://www.hklc.com/