Aegir gets a fresh coat of paint! - Introducing the Eldir theme
A few days ago I asked the amazingly talented Young Hahn, from our corporate sponsors Development Seed to take a look at the Aegir logo and see if he could make any improvements.
What I wasn't expecting was to log in on sunday night, and find that Young had not just designed an amazing new logo for us, but also created a very professional theme built specifically for Aegir. He successfully integrated the core goals of the project and built a very clean theme that leverages the functionality that Aegir provides in a clear, concise and visually appealing way.
So after picking a name, young contributed it to Drupal.org's CVS repository (where all aegir projects are hosted). The new theme is called Eldir, who was one of Aegir's helpers in norse mythology and his name also means 'Fire Stoker' in old norse.
Part of the philosophy of the Aegir project, is to have as few as possible requirements. And to that end, we have decided to make the Eldir theme an optional component, that Hostmaster will only use if it is available. Any packages we produce ourselves will also include this theme, but if you are assembling your own hostmaster profile, you can leave it out.
One of the reasons we are doing this , is because Aegir is designed to be 'white boxed' and work with any Drupal theme you throw at it, by not depending on Eldir we don't fall into the trap of just making theme level hacks for display problems, but will have to architect them properly.
This theme is going to be a god send us poor developers who are so very, very tired of Garland at this point.
Young has also written a post about the design process that lead to the new theme.
Read moreProgress Update: We've decided to fast track the 0.2 release
Me and antoine were discussing, and we're at a point where we REALLY have to look to find bugs in the alpha. We feel that the new features are more than adequate to make a proper release, so we've decided to basically go into a pseudo feature freeze.
We're going to look into adding http://drupal.org/node/371769 and possibly http://drupal.org/node/337485 still, but out main objective is to get a drush 2.x final release out as soon as humanly possible (it's the only real thing blocking release at the moment)
Read moreAegir 0.2 ALPHA 1 released.
We're proud to announce the first alpha of the 0.2 release of the Aegir hosting system for Drupal.
Ægir is a set of contributed modules for Drupal that aims to solve the problem of managing a large number of Drupal sites. It does this by providing you with a simple Drupal based hosting front end for your entire network of sites. To deploy a new site you simply have to create a new Site node. To backup or upgrade sites, you simply manage your site nodes as you would any other node.
This release is the first alpha release of our 0.2 development cycle, which has been focused on complete support for running multiple concurrent Drupal releases, and managing upgrades of sites between Drupal releases. This release has also primarily been focussed on improving and simplifying the back end system, by incorporating a lot of our custom API's upstream into the Drush 2.x project.
Update: Check out this screencast for a quick walkthrough of the features available in this release.
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Multiple Drupal sites same server. How beefy?
We've got an issue with one of our servers that hosts multiple drupal sites. It was running just fine, and now there's a problem. We're looking to see if there are any other issues causing the server slow down. We're also reassessing our server requirements and so what kind of machine would we need - how many sites can you run serving what n number of requests? I know there's a bunch of variables, how many modules etc... but i'll try and be as specific as possible.
Read moreProgress update: Package management and dependency checking
Progress towards our main development goals.
Drush stuff
Last week I completed what is basically a major rewrite of Drush, save the actual command files. Everything is a lot more sensible and normalized now. This also led to me massively refactoring Provision (our drush based back end) to make use of these new API's. I wrote up a small post about what's been happening with Drush for those that want more in depth information.
The major thing that is coming out of Drush becoming more like Provision every day, is that the drush_extras project is being re-integrated into Drush itself, using the provision conditional include API for the Drupal version specific code. Once that is done, we will be migrating Drupal install and update commands upstream to provision, which provide a much larger user base for the code, getting it far more testing. It will also significantly reduce the size of provision, and make it easier to maintain and will hopefully become the standard way that 'real' Drupal developers run update.php on their sites.
Because we are so deeply involved in Drush now, we are also tied to their release cycle. We are at a point where we want to release an alpha, but moshe has decided to re-integrate Drush_extras first, which should take about as long as it would to have gotten each version of drush_extras ready for an alpha too.
Enabled packages on a site
Aegir stuff
I haven't been resting on my laurels though, I've been tackling many of our critical issues (take a look at how good our issue queue is looking). I have been continuing in my crusade to make the Aegir project easier to build and maintain.
In the last week I finally nailed down the biggest issue that was holding us off on an alpha, namely the package management features. With drush 1.x we could rely on each platform being a site, to have access to the database, unfortunately with 0.2 that isn't possible anymore, so I wrote some routines that index entire Drupal platforms and find all the modules, themes etc for the whole platform, all the profiles and each of the sites, which I then import on the front end to build relationships between the package entities and the sites etc.
This now allows us to do some dependency checking, which we sorely needed. Previously it would let you attempt to migrate any site to any platform, no matter of the version.
This is much nicer. Imagine how great it will be once we have spaces, context and features properly playing along with all this stuff. You'll be able to roll out new features incredibly easily, and seeing that you can extract features with Drush, we can automate that too.
Package compatibility between platforms
As you can see, we're already very close to an alpha, so we're going to be working towards that along with the Drush guys. After the alpha there's going to be another phase of refactoring going on, as we'll have solved all our major issues for the release, and now it's time to make sure the codebase is up to scratch. We're also going to take some time and get some of the contrib modules playing nicely with 0.2, so that will take some time too.
I have also spent a few hours today on the community side of things, mostly fixing up the groups.drupal.org page. It looks way better now, and displays the release status proudly (keeps us honest, heh).
We'll be continuing forward in the next week or two on both the Aegir and Drush projects, and we'll probably have more announcements soon.
UPDATE: 0.2 Alpha release soon, even closer relationship to Drush.
We finally have HEAD to a stable enough state that we can work towards releasing an alpha release in the next week or so. This is pretty exciting news because it means that we're nearing the end of the 0.2 Development cycle.
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How much do you expect to pay monthly for hosting for your medium or large scale Drupal roll-out?
Back from Drupalcon.
This is just a note to say that I've just returned from Drupalcon DC.
It was a pretty amazing conference, and one of my favorites so far (I still have a soft spot for Barcelona).
Like Szeged, the video team at DCDC were very on the ball, and had the videos up the same day as the presentation.
You can catch the Aegir presentation on archive.org.
The Simple Idea.. we want your recipes..
One idea we've had is to offer people "Drupal ready to go"..
ie all the modules, settings configured.. so all you have to do is login and get creating content..
We're also going to use it for all the workshops, etc..
We've added a proposal here - http://groups.drupal.org/node/19479
Take a look, give us your feedback, and if you like the idea, please signin/register then vote..
It really is a case.. of if you don't speak now.. it won't happen.
We'd also love to find people what can supply "recipes".. or that have wishlists.
Read moreProgress update - Frontend and Backend are now completely separate. Experimental multi-server support.
One of the major changes to Aegir for the 0.2 release, is integrating with Drush 2.x.
What this comes down to is that, like Drush, Provision has ceased being a 'module' in the traditional sense.
Each server that Aegir manages will now need to have one instance of Drush, and one instance of Provision.
This resulted in some refactoring in the Hosting module, as it was depending on Provision being available as a module for a number of things.
One of the other things that I added to the code in HEAD, once the refactoring had taken place, is the ability to call instances of Drush and Provision on remote servers. This means that you can now install, enable, disable, delete, backup, roll back , and upgrade Drupal sites on multiple servers, that are managed by Aegir.
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