aegir

We're proud to announce the final 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 final 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. The only changes from the release candidate were some miscellaneous bug fixes and bringing the system in line with the Drush 2.0 final release.

Drush 2.0 has been released!

This has been the major blocker for our 0.2 release, which will happen very very soon.

I’m working out of Development Seed’s main office here in Washington, DC for a few weeks, which gives me the opportunity to show off some of the cool stuff we’ve been working on at the Drupal Meetup tonight at Stetsons. I’ll talk about Aegir, a hosting system that streamlines deploying and upgrading multiple Drupal sites, and show its support of installation profiles and multiple languages.

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Just to give this some more visibility, I have made a very thorough screencast showing how to install the newest release.

We're proud to announce the first release candidate 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 release candidate 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 been focussed on improving some our experimental multi-client functionality, as well as fixing bugs for our final release.

Aegir is in code freeze, and only bug fixes and usability improvements will be allowed in. The final release of Aegir will occur shortly after the 2.0 final release of Drush, and we will only be making changes to Aegir to maintain compatibility with Drush upstream.

We're proud to announce the first beta 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 beta 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 fixing bugs and polishing the final release of the 0.2 release.

The amazingly talented Young Hahn, from our corporate sponsors Development Seed worked his magic to provide Aegir with a new logo. Young has also written a post about the design process that lead to the new logo.

This new logo will provide Aegir with better branding opportunities, and is the first step towards legitimizing Aegir as the powerful product it is.
Unlike the previous logo, it is ideal for the purposes of print media, and will also allow us to design things like Aegir t-shirts, baseball caps etc.

Aegir as a product is finally starting to take shape, and it is going to be a very exciting time for us.

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.

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)

Just a note for anyone wanting to learn more about Aegir, there are 2 separate presentations going down at local drupal user groups tomorrow.

Brian Wood will be doing a presentation at the Berkeley Drupal User Group and Robin Puga will be doing another Aegir presentation at the Vancouver user group.

If you're in the area, and want more info, and speak to people who have been following the project for a while, do drop by.