So you've installed Aegir, arrived at the home page of your installation and are waiting for the magic to begin. On this page we'll show you some of the things you can do with Aegir and how easy it is to use.
1. Get to Know the Interface
Once you've successfully completed an Aegir installation, you'll be presented with the homepage, titled 'Hosted Sites'.
In a standard installation there won't be any sites listed here yet, other than the main Aegir site itself, which gets imported into the system during the last stages of the installation. This is normal - Aegir even recognises itself as a Drupal site on your server.
At the very top of the screen you'll see the admin menu. In everyday use of Aegir you won't need to use this, but it gives you access to all the normal Drupal administrative functionality.
In the sidebar on the right, several blocks are enabled. The first is 'Queues'. This list shows all the tasks that Aegir has recently run, or is about to run. It shows the last 5, but there is a link to see the full task queues.
After installation there will be as many as three tasks in the queue: a Verify task for the main Aegir platform, the Import task of the main Aegir site, and the Verify task that runs on the main Aegir site after it has imported.
They should be green in colour or blue-grey if queued. If any task is red, this signifies that something has gone wrong and needs addressing.
It's worth checking the Queue regularly to see that Task or Cron queues are being run regularly. If not you may have a problem with the cron setup on your server - see the FAQ: http://groups.drupal.org/node/24854#cron
Below Queues, you will see a summary of the Platforms, Web Servers and Database Servers that Aegir is managing.
Underneath the Summary queue is the standard Navigation block in Drupal.
2. Setup Some Platforms
Platforms are codebases that Aegir uses to setup websites on - using Drupal's multi-site capabilities to run many sites from one codebase.
You can setup sites immediately on the same codebase/Platform as Aegir, but it is recommended to use a separate platform and run your sites on a different codebase to the main Aegir site.
To setup a new platform in Aegir see: http://groups.drupal.org/node/24991
3. Import Existing Websites
It's very easy to move your existing drupal websites to be hosted under Aegir. Then you can upgrade them through the 'Migrate' task just as you can with sites created by Aegir.
To import existing websites into Aegir see: http://groups.drupal.org/node/24992
4. Setup New Websites in Aegir
A new Drupal website can be set up in Aegir at the click of a button.
To setup new websites in Aegir see: http://groups.drupal.org/node/24994
4. Migrate/Upgrade Websites
Once you have websites running in Aegir, the time is going to come to upgrade them. To upgrade a site, you Migrate it to a new Platform (or codebase) that contains the updates. This literally moves the site to the new codebase and in the process, runs the equivalent of 'update.php' to apply any database updates.
To migrate websites with Aegir see: http://groups.drupal.org/node/24993
5. Getting help
The Issue Queue for all the projects that make up Aegir is here.
This is the first place to look - chances are someone's had the same problem as you before, and you'll get the quickest answers by searching for what they discovered.
You can join the #aegir channel at Freenode on IRC. (IRC instructions for drupal users are at: http://drupal.org/irc). It's a friendly community, but a small one, so ask nicely and be patient!
6. Contributing
If you're a developer, take a look at the issue queue to see where you can help. Documentation help is welcome here in the group. Otherwise testing and detailed feedback seems to be well received too. The best way to start contributing is to lurk in the IRC #aegir channel, get to know people and see what's being worked on and how you can help. You may also want to browse the groups page for the roadmap and other discussions to see if there's something you can particularly help with.
Thanks
And finally we should all thank the guys who made Aegir, as it's going to make our lives a whole lot easier. The main developers are known online as Vertice ('adrian' on drupal.org), anarcat, and mig5.