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News

Greetings from the Aegir project!

This is the second in a roughly-monthly/whenever I feel like it newsletter update on all things Aegir. Your feedback is welcome!

Development Activity

Well - since the last newsletter, we rolled out 1.6 as expected! We encourage all users to upgrade to 1.6 as it's very stable and we've also had good reports about the seamless upgrade process from our users.

You can read the release notes for the 1.6 release on the community site. [1]

Next up on anarcat's radar at Koumbit is developing LDAP integration for Aegir. This is bound to be useful for other users who are using LDAP for centralised authentication between services.

Not too much other big development news as we've all been a bit busy towards the end of the year for various reasons!

Tutorials and documentation

Some work is being put into the community site to allow for 'taxonomy' tagging of discussion threads to be specific to, say, operating systems affected. This should allow users to more conveniently 'filter' the community site for existing threads/information specific to their OS when trying to debug problems.

Follow this ticket [2] if you want to help try out the feature and provide feedback. Thanks to ergonlogic for his continued excellent maintenance and improvement of the community site.

Events and Community

Since last time

Apparently the session at DrupalCamp Toronto that happened last month went well and was performed to a packed room - it was possibly the first ever Aegir session presented in Toronto so was a good introduction for many people.

I missed this last newsletter: Mark Shropshire was briefly interviewed in October at DrupalCamp Atlanta 2011 about how he uses Aegir at UNC Charlotte. [3]

Upcoming

anarcat and ergonlogic from Koumbit are both heading to DrupalCamp NYC on the weekend [4] where the 'Aegir-Based Business Models' session will be presented. There they will also try and get some time to hack on the Puppet-Aegir module that Koumbit are working on too.

My session 'Aegir: Skynet for Drupal' was officially accepted into the DrupalDownUnder 2011 program [5]. I'll be presenting next month on the Saturday 14th in Melbourne, where I'll try and achieve the impossible: do both an introduction/basic usage as well as advanced usage (CLI, automation), plus roadmap and the usual stuff, all within 45 minutes :) hope to see you there!

As always - if there's another upcoming event I'm not aware of, do let me know so I can spam people about it.

Donations

Our Community site, mailing lists, and especially our Jenkins server and automated cloud-based testing suite cost money to run and we (developers) fund it ourselves just for the sake of keeping it running. Your donations are always very welcome and go directly to covering the costs of running servers. You can donate to the project via Koumbit [6]

A year later - tribute and thanks to Adrian Rossouw

Today happens to be officially one year since Adrian Rossouw, original author of the Aegir project and even the very idea of it, officially retired from working on the project (and PHP in general :P ) to concentrate his efforts elsewhere.

Adrian keeps in touch with the team and it's been good to see him thrive in his new ambitions with node.js, as well as nice to remind ourselves that this project is bigger than any one person/company and we've successfully sustained the Aegir project bus-factor-free since he moved on.

Adrian propelled the project from its early days as a part Python/PostgreSQL/core-hacked project that wasn't even multi-platform capable, to where we are today with a Drupal-powered beast capable of managing many servers, migrations/cloning between multiple codebases (and distributions!) and automating the whole deployment stack.

There is no other opensource Drupal solution with all the features Aegir has, and we largely have Adrian's vision to thank for getting to that point, and maintaining that position in the growing 'Drupal deployment/site management product' space.

Thanks again Adrian!

While I'm being nostalgic, let's re-watch a very early screencast of Adrian installing Aegir prior to 0.2 [7] at Drupal Szeged 2008 - back when it used Garland theme! :) And those of you who are DrupalCon San Francisco 2010 veterans can laugh/groan when you revisit that old install profile wizard we used to have :)

And finally, thanks to all our users for continuing to support us. Have a terrific and safe holiday break (if you're getting one!) and speak to you in the new year!

mig5 and the Aegir team