EU ministers of agriculture will have a fishery meeting on Jan 24th. The meeting agenda includes software patents. The agriculture ministers tried to make a decision on the new European Patent directive earlier, but the Polish agriculture minister, Wlodzimierz Marcinski saved European software business by requesting the withdrawal of patents from the agenda. I've written the following (in Finnish) to...

Yesterday I got the mRFC 0007 compliant Site Creation Wizard for Midgard CMS into feature-complete state for phase one. This enables Midgard users and developers to test and comment the tool while I refine the user interface and help texts. Here's a screenshot tour of the current wizard

After quite some planning, I've today started coding a site creation wizard for Midgard CMS. The goal of this wizard is to make the Midgard learning curve less steep for new users and the site creation process more efficient. The specifications for the wizard can be found in mRFC 0007: Midgard Site Creation Wizard.

Hot on the heels of my previous Midgard CMS tutorial, "Creating custom navigation with MidCOM, here is a new one about adding categories to a Midgard-powered blog. I've written this in response to Robert Guerra's questions. Midgard CMS contains a powerful PHP-level data abstraction layer called datamanager. With datamanager it is possible to freely modify the content fields and editing...

I really like this comment in CMS Watch's latest Web Content Management Marketplace article:

Today we secured funding from two clients for developing an integrated search engine into the Midgard CMS. The project will be undertaken by Torben Nehmer and will also improve Midgard's metadata capabilities.

Based on some chats today and yesterday with Privaterra and others, here are couple typical new Midgardian gotchas: Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 8388608 bytes exhausted when trying to create a subtopicCurrently MidCOM's component listing used in the "Create subtopic" dialog needs quite a bit of memory. While solution is being planned, the easier way is to edit your...

One frequent question I see on #midgard is how to customize the default navigation options shipping with the MidCOM template site. In my opinion, there are two options: Either stick with the existing navigation styles and customize via CSS, or roll your own in PHP.

There has been some discussion on the Midgard IRC channel comparing Midgard CMS to the WordPress blogging system. Adam Douglas commented:

As Eero has rolled out OpenPSA 1.10, I thought it would be time to update the visual outlook of the project. Before: After: What do you think? Next we will need a logo for OpenPSA. I will announce a logo contest soon.