What has changed in OpenPSA 9

Actually, the better question might be, what hasn't? One thing that remained the same is the full support for the Midgard 8.09 storage backend. That means existing installations can upgrade without having to make the jump to Midgard2 at the same time. While it is recommended to switch to the file-based startup and theme logic, using Pages and Styles should continue to work like it did in the good ol' days.

The need for a migration path to the Midgard 10.04 LTS storage backend was in fact one of the driving factors behind the OpenPSA 9 endeavor: Since the Midgard 8.09 series' EOL date draws ever closer, compatibility with more recent versions is becoming important for the project's long term viability. Work on this task began right after the creation of the O9 repository in November, and after lots of long, tedious debugging sessions which were greatly supported by the Midgard team (thanks guys!), both Midgard 10.04 and OpenPSA9 are now in a state where they work together quite nicely. A few minor irritations remain, but they should be sorted out in time for the stable release.

For the first release, we will also try to maintain API compatibility with MidCOM wherever possible, which means that getting Ragnaroek components to run on OpenPSA's framework should not require too much work. Some simple search and replaces in the source might be necessary (depending on the age of the component), but compatibility wrappers are in place to cover all the major API differences. The big exception here is Ragnaroek's Multilang feature, which is no longer available in more recent Midgard versions, and has thus been removed from OpenPSA as well.

So this is the base we're having right now: A framework that incorporates the experience gained from years of productive deployments of MidCOM-based systems and that paves the way for all the new Midgard2 hotness, with PHPCR on the horizon and more beyond.

Stay tuned for more articles detailing the actual application features, or, if you're impatient, get OpenPSA from github, play around with it, and let us know what you think!