This winter's Midgard meeting has been a bit different than the usual fare. Instead of running the session only in one place, the meeting already started last monday with work on the new replication framework and a dinner with Helsinki-based Midgardians. Then after the week spent on replication we packed our team to a Land Rover and drove to Linköping for the actual event.

Ferry trip was quite eventful, as usual, and so on friday most were quite tired and hung over. But even with that, discussion has been very interesting and there has also been quite a bit of code.

First topic discussed on friday was the new help system Anykey is building for Midgard with the sponsorship of the .se foundation. We will make the documentation files more closely tied to component handler IDs, and link the help menu to tagged searches on the Midgard site.

Easier Midgard installation was a big topic in this meeting. For it we collected the gripes different community members had about installation and discussed ways to make it better.

The two major solutions for that are to make binary packages of Midgard more available for different distributions, possibly through EPM. But the main area that needs rethinking and rewriting is making a smart PHP-based Midgard database and configuration setup tool to remove Datagard.

We also held a session on MidCOM development, helping attendees to get SVN checkouts running on their machines, showing how to quickly create a first component, helping with localization work and making some mass cleanups into the repository.

The MidCOM roadmap towards 3.0 was also clarified, including move to Midgard pages, deprecating PHP4, restructuring dynamic loads and making indexer a service provided by the DBA layer instead of handled by components themselves. MidCOM 2.7 targets will however remain as they were: the release will be basically 2.6 plus collector, replication and multilingual site management.