2.1 released!

The Aegir team is proud to announce the second release in the stable 2.x release branch!

But first, here's a word from Antoine Beaupré:

This latest release of the Aegir project will be the last one for me as a release manager, as I will be stepping down from the leadership position I have filled in the 7 years of involvement in this amazing project. I will continue to contribute to the project, to a lesser extent. I will remain available, through Koumbit, to provide high-level consulting work for Aegir. We can also now welcome Praxis Labs Coop as a new consulting partner of the Aegir project. Praxis will help to finance ongoing Aegir development by subsidizing part of my salary, in a similar fashion to how Omega8.cc had in the past.

Working with the Aegir project was a huge challenge, both from a technical perspective, but also from a human standpoint, as it is a large and complex project that may seem daunting for new users. But with regular releases and continuous support in the issue queue, I think we have been able to foster a great community of contributors that goes beyond what a single person can do, as Adrian proved when he left the project with the 1.0 release in 2011. Christopher (ergonlogic) and other contributors have shown they are in a good position to take over that leadership role, and will do so from now on.

Now it is my turn to move on, and I am quite proud of what I leave behind. This project allowed me to travel around the world, meet incredible people and learn a lot about hosting and provisioning. It is however time for me to move on. I have been involved with the Drupal community for over 13 years, and things, to put it lightly, have changed. PHP is attempting to become a real programming language, something that I didn't believe could or should happen, and I wish to move on to other paradigms. Python and Haskell are waiting for me around this turn in the road, and even Perl and shell scripting look awesome in comparison to those dreaded PHP years. Besides, since Aegir started, lots of configuration management systems have popped up that we can leverage to host way more than PHP and Drupal: Docker, Chef, Puppet hold lots of promise for those of us who dare to get out of the NIH syndrome. Hopefully, that energy will be reusable in the Aegir project as we head towards Aegir 4!

And so, thank you, Antoine, for all your great contributions as leader of the Aegir project! You have been an inspiration to many of us, and have provided superbly effective technical leadership.

This release ships with support for Apache 2.4, along with updates to Drupal core and ModalframeAPI. A number of bug-fixes are included affecting deployment of Drupal 7 sites, aliases with sub-directory installs, backups, among other things. Everyone is encouraged to upgrade.

See the release notes for more details!