With beta2 out today, the new Midgard 8.09, or "Ragnaroek LTS" is finally coming. PHP4 has been dropped, many optimizations made, and now that Prototype has been dropped in favor of jQuery, I think we will finally be able to live with it as the Long Term Support release.

But before Ragnaroek is stable a lot of testing has to happen, as should polishing here and there. Piotras is fixing the site wizard, and I've been adding more information about the installed components.

Unlike eZComponents which are just libraries, components in Midgard are the building blocks of a website. Each of them is its own PHP application that the MidCOM MVC framework runs when a folder associated with that component is accessed. They all supply their own templates, localizations, and load whatever libraries needed.

Currently we have some 120 components in the MidCOM repository, and most of them have releases on the PEAR channel. The components range from simple things like a news listing to very specific applications like event registration or invoice processing.

One way to make components more visual was to add icons for them. MidCOM has had support for component icons for a while now, but they haven't really been used anywhere. So I made them used more widely:

Icons clarify component selection when creating a new folder:

Icons visualize how many components a developer has contributed to:

...and icons also make the localization tool more visual:

Finding good icons for many of the components is quite difficult. We're working with Kalle Persson from the Tango project to create new ones as needed.