This is the first instalment of what I hope to make a monthly communiqué to the Aegir community. The intention here is to highlight news relating to the Aegir Project, including:

• important changes within project itself,
• recent bugfixes and feature additions,
• upcoming events,
• interesting contrib projects,
• outstanding contributors, and
• important issues that could use more community input or testing.

1. Transition of leadership

Perhaps the biggest news to accompany our latest release is Antoine Beaupré's decision to step down as the project leader. He wrote an open letter to the community in the release notes explaining his decision. Let's make sure to continue showing him the respect and gratitude he deserves for his tireless efforts guiding the project through several major releases.

Rather than perpetuate a tradition wherein the departing leader passes the torch to his chosen successor, the core team decided to pursue a more democratic process. To that end, we've defined the Aegir Project Leader (APL) role, to which I was elected unanimously.

For my part, I'm honoured to take up this duty, and glad to have the full backing of the core team. I felt this support was particularly important, since I plan on taking a more active role in leading the project than we've seen previously. To that end, I am continuously seeking consensus among the core team for initiatives we'll be pursuing over the coming months and years. I detail a couple of these projects in the rest of this post.

Let me emphasize that Antoine is not leaving the project altogether, but rather just passing on the leadership role to me. Part of this transition also entails Koumbit Networks passing much of their Aegir consulting practice to Praxis Labs Coop, a worker's cooperative that I helped co-found last year. Among other things, the revenues from this consulting will help to subsidize Antoine's ongoing work on Aegir core.

2. Refresh of Aegir web presence

First, I'd like to suggest that we re-vamp the project's websites. We've been discussing this already in:

• #2112977: Upgrade community site OpenAtrium, and
• #2223805: Move examples and documentation to a separate project.

Over the years, we've spent a lot of time both developing and maintaining the community site. Moving to a new Drupal-based platform promises only more such distractions. I'd like to echo Antoine's suggestion to use external tools for the site's main functionality:

• Documentation: Read The Docs
• Q&A/community support: AskBot, a dedicated StackExchange site, or just use the 'aegir' tag on Drupal's StackExchange, as Drush does.

Both Read The Docs and AskBot are themselves Free Software projects. The former offers free (as in gratis) hosting, whereas the latter offers a $15/month subscription for a hosted version. Praxis is ready to cover this cost, and kick in a matching donation to Read The Docs' gittip. But, since the point is to off-load management of these components from the core team, we'd really like you feedback on the these.

I'm especially excited about the git-based workflow that Read The Docs supports. We'll be able to maintain documentation branches, just as we do with the code-base itself. We'll be hosting the docs repo on github.com, which makes pull requests and in-line editing a breeze. We're also considering mirroring our various projects on GitHub to make forks easier, and support a pull-request workflow there too. Follow the Aegir organization to keep up with these developments.

With those, we can archive the existing site, and begin moving documentation over to these new platforms. A partner of Praxis' (Poetic Systems) is quite keen on sponsoring the Aegir community's efforts, and has offered to design and build a new aegirproject.org, that can better show off what Aegir can do. Help on this from other shops and individuals is also welcome. This site would probably also include an 'Aegir planet' blog roll, an events calendar and maybe an 'official' blog.

Our API site, Debian repository and continuous integration server could all also do with some work. Such infrastructure improvements should form a component of our Aegir 3 release schedule.

Speaking of Aegir 3...

3. Aegir 3

Obviously, the next big release will be Aegir 3. We hope that it will in fact be Aegir 3.0.0, as semantic versioning will provide some important flexibility within the project. In particular, since Aegir 3 will run on Drupal 7, it can have a fairly long support cycle, since we won't be facing Drupal 6's end-of-life as with previous versions.

Rather than have new features pile up in a dev branch, and only allow bugfixes into the stable release (as we did for Aegir 1.x -> 2.x), we'll be able to make minor releases with feature enhancements available throughout Aegir 3.x.y's cycle. This, in turn, will give us the time for a more radical re-factoring of Aegir for the next major release after that.

In the coming weeks, we'll update the Aegir 3 Roadmap with specific goals for an initial Aegir 3.0.0 release. In addition, we plan on including a broader set of Golden Contrib modules in the Aegir distribution. So we'll need to decide on these, and begin porting them to Drupal 7 and Aegir 3 as well.

At Praxis, we've begun working with Packer, a tool for building virtual machine images, including Vagrant baseboxes. We have a preliminary basebox template that builds out a full Aegir 3.x install, and in the near future we'll release this basebox to allow for broader community testing/bug-fixing. I'll write another post detailing how to use this basebox to test patches and git branches, as well as a simple workflow for creating patches.

4. New Opportunities to Contribute

As you're all no doubt aware, Aegir is a big, complex project. I know that I was intimidated by this complexity at a number of stages. It took a while for me to get up the courage to even ask questions in IRC. But, as I was initially discovering the project, I had questions that weren't answered by the docs. So, I overcame my timidity and began to regularly ask questions, and record the answers in the wiki. I was soon granted access to help manage the community site, and add more wiki-like functionality, to allow for easier contributions.

Eventually, I started to see gaps in Aegir's functionality, especially in regards to using it as a Software-as-a-Service platform, which was my main interest at the time. So, I started scratching my own itch, by both discussing this functionality with Aegir core and contrib developers, and then writing my own contrib modules. This, in turn, led me to writing (an re-writing!) patches to Aegir core, and an ever deeper familiarity with the Aegir API.

Even a fairly basic contribution to the docs means that much less that someone else (possibly a co-maintainer) has to do. Testing patches against the latest Aegir 7.x-3.x, and providing feedback in the issue queues is invaluable! It should also be easier than ever with the upcoming Vagrant basebox. Contributions to Golden Contrib (and other contrib extensions) is intended as an on-ramp to co-maintainership for those who want to pursue this path. Mentoring from more experienced developers is usually available for anyone who asks.

Over the years, I've spoken to many of you, and heard that you feel similar intimidation faced with Aegir's expansive functionality, and complex internals, but want to contribute nonetheless. An underlying thrust of the initiatives listed above is to provide more opportunities for the Aegir Community (this means you!) to help make Aegir great. So I'd like to encourage everyone reading this to help out where you can. This is, after all, the nature of Free Software.

Finally, Herman 'helmo' van Rink, a fellow co-maintainer of Aegir core, has undertaken a number of initiatives to make it easier to support the project financially. Donations to the Aegir Project are always welcome. So if you feel that Aegir either saves you time and expenses, or makes you revenues as part of your own services, please consider making a regular contribution to supporting the project and its infrastructure.