Aegir 0.3 released

The Aegir project is proud to announce version 0.3 of the Aegir Hosting System.

As a project, we have always focused on keeping our goals for each release as clear as possible, and this has allowed us to accomplish many great things. After the major new features and refactoring involved in our 0.2 release, we decided to focus on building the best Drupal 6 based front end that we are able to.

The initial port to Drupal 6 was accomplished relatively early in the development cycle, and we have been spending our time since refining, testing and polishing what is undoubtedly our finest release yet.

A lot of issues in the system were fixed since the 0.2 release and we owe all this to our growing army of contributers, who have risen to the challenge and have been the foundation of our accomplishments.

Without the support of our developers, testers and especially the documentation contributors, this release would not have been possible. Aegir is easier to install, easier to use and better documented than it has ever been.

Onward and upward!

The 0.3 release finally unfreezes the tree for new features to come into what will become Aegir 0.4. The official stated goal for this release, is that we wish to properly support 'multiple servers', and embrace the distributed nature of Aegir.

****The high priority features on that ever growing list are:****

• The ability to easily manage site running on as many servers as you need, with advanced configurations such as multiple web server front ends, load balancers, proxies and database servers.
• site cloning support: The ability to duplicate an existing site exactly with a different url, as well as tracking multiple instances of sites (for example 'development', 'staging' and 'live' instances)
• refactoring the user interface: Improve the consistency and usability of the front end with the same razor focus we applied to our back end release.
• alias redirection: redirect www.example.com to example.com
• various people will also be expanding Aegir with third party modules: DNS and Mail support, inter-site security using mod_itk, SSL support, a flexible quota system

One of the major changes that we are looking forward to in the next development cycle, is improving the quality of our developer interaction by re-evaluating the tools that we use to manage the Aegir project.

Most of the developer community is already using Git as their primary version control system, so we have decided to make it official. After this release, the project is going to make the transition to distributed version control, which will allow us to work more efficiently as a team and remove roadblock to contributing to the project.

It will also allow us to more efficiently package the system, which will improve the end user experience by making Aegir easier to download and install than ever before. We will also be looking at other ways to improve the visibility and improve collaboration on the project.

We're also proud to welcome a new committer to our team that has contributed excellent patches and testing throughout the development of 0.3, mig5! With that addition and Anarcat being more and more acknowledged with the internals, we're now much more resilient to the "bus factor" of the project, which was an issue and bottleneck in the 0.1 and 0.2 days when Adrian was really the only guy that actually knew how everything worked.

We hope that release will see even greater adoption in what is already an great success (450 members in the group, 60 known installs, which is a large number considering what Aegir is for). People are always welcome to contribute to the project, we are always in great need of testers, documenters, themers and of course coders to help the great people that are already hard at work at providing the best Drupal hosting system out there.

****Meet the team****

For those of you lucky enough to attend Drupalcon Paris 2009, we are going to be present in a big way, and there are a number of sessions you might want to attend.

Automate your site maintenance troubles away with the Aegir hosting system. (presented by Adrian and Anarcat)

Aegir: Build once, Deploy often. Real-life use cases.

Open Atrium; Building a product with Drupal and the Power of Decentralized Features

Staging Drupal : Managing your project in multiple environments.

We will also be collaborating during the Code sprint on 1 September 2009, if you want to join us in breaking ground on our next phase of development.

Enjoy Aegir 0.3, we know we will!

****Installation and upgrade instructions:****

• INSTALL.txt
• UPGRADE.txt

****Major bugfixes:****

• MySQL passwords are not showed in the clear in the the task or process list anymore (see http://drupal.org/node/559404)
• issues with file permission handling and sites with lots of files have been fixed (see http://groups.drupal.org/node/24854#fileperms)
• fixed site deletion, the signup form, tasks permissions, and a whole slew of annoying issues that crept up in the 0.2 backend release

****Other cool stuff****

• INSTALL.txt has been greatly expanded and improved and is now the canonical source of information on how to install Aegir
• SVG of the Aegir logo now available
• the Aegir frontend is now a "real" site (ie. not hidden in sites/default) and which you can backup like any other site (but not yet restore/migrate/delete, for obvious reasons)

The Aegir team