This is a brief outline of development plans for Aegir.

Note that all formal Aegir releases (ie. not those marked, "alpha", "beta" or "release candidates" or "RC") are production-ready. We strive hard to maintain good code quality and Q/A by frequent releases and alpha/beta/RC stages before those formal releases so even if the releases are marked 0.x, it's not because they are not stable or ready, it's simply because the API is not stable (see below).

0.1 - "Sites" - Single platform support

Solid release for Drupal 5 platform. Will not be able to upgrade. Production ready.

0.2 - "Upgrades" - Multiple platforms support

Support for more than one Drupal release. Support for migration between Drupal releases. Experimental support for remote SQL servers. Frontend still in Drupal 5.

0.3 - "d6" - Drupal 6 frontend support

In the backend: bugfix release of 0.2. In the frontend: port to Drupal 6.

0.4 - "Cloud" - Multiple servers support

Support ssh as communication channel between multiple servers (see this issue) Move sites between servers, and support for multiple db servers and moving between them.

Release goals for 0.4

0.5 - "apt-get" - proper deployment procedures

proper deployment procedures (features? proper project management? etc)

0.6 - "UX" - User interface improvements

Clean up and make the user interface friendlier.

1.0 - "API" - API freeze

A stable, published API for Hostmaster modules that will be frozen during the whole lifetime of the 1.0 branch to ease long term support for third party extensions.

From there on...

Extension modules

There is also a host (pun intended) of provisioning tasks that it would be nice to see created:

• LDAP (open LDAP)
• Solr Search (Tomcat)
• Jabber (ejabberd)
• DNS (Bind, DNSmasq etc - Actually already implemented in the 0.4 line)
• Pound (load balancer)
• Email (Zimbra)
• An RDF triple store (needs more research)
• Asterisk (voicemail, proxy)

Mass site operation modules

• Search (could be related to Solr)
• Statistics (info on nodes/comments/users etc. across all / many sites)
• Logging (centralized logging overview, might just be web interface for syslog)
• Spam / Comment moderation (we had some discussion about writing a Mollom module that works across sites)

Feel free to contact the developers if you are interested in pitching in to work on one or more aspects of Aegir.