General discussions

I have been able to upgrade Aegir with the provision module (that is, manually, on the commandline), but not with Aegir (that is, the hosting frontend) itself directly, because it's much trickier. Nevertheless, the problems impeding manual migration of the base Aegir platform are now behind us, which allows us to easily upgrade (say) the Drupal core behind the frontend. I have documented how in the UPGRADE.txt file.

This brings me to announce some of the IRC discussions we are having right now. We are seriously considering doing a release of 0.2 that will support both Drupal 5 and 6.

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.

While migrating our test platform to a production server and our usual MySQL cluster, we have stumbled upon some bugs with the remote MySQL support (which is technically not part of the release objectives, but so trivial and expected that I'm putting extra work on it). I have also fixed up a bit the INSTALL.txt and can confirm that HEAD still works fine and installs properly with Drush's HEAD too.

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)

Click on the image below to watch the screencast of the 0.2 release of Aegir.

Just a quick note to let everyone know that we made a new release for Drush 2.x earlier tonight.
This was the only item blocking the release of our 0.2-alpha1 release for Aegir, so we will be able to make a release in the next few days.

I've been trying to get Aegir running and have had lots of problems. I just tried a fresh checkout/install of everything and got through the installation and configuration wizard steps error free this time, but am unable to provision a new site. It looks like the code and database are out of sync? Or is there a setup step I missed or something?

By now, many of you are probably aware of the fact that I have joined the Development Seed team.

Before I go into the specifics, I would just like to thank Raincity Studios, for giving me the opportunity to start this project. Without their support, Aegir might never have gotten off the ground, and the experience I gained from developing and maintaining Hostmaster (Aegir's predecessor) has been invaluable in guiding the Aegir project to where it is today. I wish them all the best of luck, and I look forward to seeing them prosper from the foresight that guided them to support the project thus far.

I saw the DrupalCon DC presentation and was very impressed by Aegir. We're currently evaluating systems that can help us deploy sites to our servers quickly and easily, and then keep them up to date.

I have got Aegir working on my system, and have installed a site using it, it was all relatively pain-free. My question is thus:

Is Aegir built to deploy sites onto identical platforms, i.e. without any site specific code? Or is there a way to add certain modules to specific sites but keeping them on the same core platform of modules?