MidCOM

MidCOM (short for "Midgard Component Framework") is an Open Source Content Management Framework written in PHP. It provides a number of services (like authentication, user notification and revision control), a database abstraction layer (DBA) around Midgard objects and an interface for writing modules in the form of MidCOM Components.

For content management, WYSIWYG editors like TinyMCE and jQuery-based Datamanager2 widgets facilitate content editing on the actual website. Many more MidCOM Features are described in a separate article.

Development

MidCOM uses the Midgard API via a Database Abstraction Layer for most DB access with MgdSchema based entities. It offers a Style Engine for rendering (templates. Routing is component and topic-based and can be extended with MidCOM URL Methods to embed commands into request URLs.

History

MidCOM was originally developed separate from the Midgard core, but was later included in the standard distribution. Before MidCOM 2.0, MidCOM's functionality was stored in a MySQL database, starting from version 2.0, it is stored in the file system. midcom-fs is the designation for current versions, as opposed to midcom-db, which refers to 1.x versions.

The most recent MidCOM release is the 8.09 LTS series, which will be supported until 2013. The OpenPSA framework was forked from MidCOM in November 2010 at the Midgard developer meeting and is developed independently since then.

The new OpenPSA application and the underlying framework start with version number 9.0.

Installation

OpenPSA 9.0 libraries and applications are installable via Composer and available on Packagist.

MidCOM versions between 2.6.0 and 8.09 are available as PEAR packages to ease installation and tracking dependencies. The installation can be triggered from Datagard, additional packages can be installed from the command line. To enable MidCOM for a specific website, one can create a new Host with Midgard Sitewizard or modify the respective Page Elements for an existing Host. If you choose the manual installation, the MidCOM root Topic must be enabled in a Host's Root Page, usually in code-global or code-init. Furthermore, a link to the static directory, which is usually called midcom-static, must be acessible to Apache from the Virtual Host's DocumentRoot.

See also Troubleshooting for typical installation problems

Configuration

MidCOM site configuration is saved in the Page Element code-init. Many of the config options are also accessible via the Toolbar. See MidCOM Configuration for an overview of config options.

The components can be configured per Sitegroup in a special Snippetdir called sitegroup-config. To configure a Component, a Subsnippetdir with the name of the component has to be created. Alternatively, global component configuration can be done in Asgard. Configuration on a per-Topic-level can be done in a MidCOM Toolbar. See MidCOM Component Configuration for details.

Administration

Most administration tasks are handled from the MidCOM Toolbars, which dynamically load a number of plugins to control different aspects of the MidCOM system, for example:

midcom.admin.babel - Localization of system messages

midcom.admin.folder - Topic management

midcom.admin.settings - Site-wide settings

no.bergfald.rcs - RCS system

For MidCOM versions starting at 2.8., Asgard, provided by midgard.admin.asgard unifies many of these admin features and provides a generic MidCOM object editor.