After much hard work by Piotras and the rest of the Midgard team, Midgard 1.6 is now the stable release of the Midgard CMS.

This is very cool since it brings lots of new features like MultiLang and datagard available for the Midgard population. The release announcement says about the new data package:

The revised Midgard-data package provides an out-of-the-box setup complete with Aegir and Spider administration tools and the MidCOM component framework. Aegir is a comprehensive and powerful administration tool targeted at Midgard power users. Spider provides similar administrative features in accessible way, allowing disabled users and simpler web browsers to manage websites. In addition to the Midgard applications, midgard-data also ships several command-line utilities including the yamp packaging scripts useful to Midgard application developers and the datagard Midgard database and virtual host setup tool.

MidCOM 1.4.0 is a full component framework which enables site builders to construct their web sites from ready-made and configurable site features, or components. All MidCOM components provide uniformal and localized ways for configuration and content management. The configuration system allows site developers to fully control the way the components behave, including their output templates and content structure and form field definitions.

We will hopefully get started with rolling the release out to client servers late this week, and will make the UTF-8 and MultiLang conversions after a bit of internal upgrade testing.

Binary packages are already available for Debian unstable, with RPMs and Debian testing .debs expected tomorrow.

In related news, Midgard usage on public sites grew 11% during October, according to SecuritySpace.