Pyhä and Luosto, two skiing centers in Lapland are now powered by Midgard CMS. Their websites are portals containing both general travel information and the sub-sites of hundreds of local hotels, restaurants and other businesses.

The portals were designed by advertisement agency Linnunrata and mainly built by Arttu Manninen from Protie. The Midgardization was supervised by Nemein. Hosting for the portals is provided by Nebula’s Midgard Webhotel service.

Updated 2005-11-21: Arttu has posted his viewpoint on the project, particularly dealing with the delays, compromises and learning curve associated with such a major project. As always, setting priorities is difficult:

Custom development is that murky world where a customer tells you what to build, and you say, “are you sure?” and they say yes, and you make an absolutely beautiful spec, and say, “is this what you want?” and they say yes, and you make them sign the spec in indelible ink, nay, blood, and they do, and then you build that thing they signed off on, promptly, precisely and exactly, and they see it and they are horrified and shocked, and you spend the rest of the week reading up on whether your E&O insurance is going to cover the legal fees for the lawsuit you’ve gotten yourself into or merely the settlement cost. Or, if you’re really lucky, the customer will smile wanly and put your code in a drawer and never use it again and never call you back.

Luckily the situation wasn’t quite that bad in this project, and the portal is actually up and running. Some performance optimization still remains to be done, including an upgrade to MySQL 4 with its query cache.