Development Seed

This is a followup to the roadmap for the next few alpha releases of the Aegir Hosting System for Drupal. As you are seeing, it is working out really well for us to treat each alpha release as a proper release of its own and focus on one of our major goals for the larger stable release. To that end we decided to spend a few weeks focusing on the user interface and making improvements to the workflow of managing your sites via Aegir.

The irony is that these pictures have no way of doing these changes justice, because it feels like we've breathed life into the user interface. Instead of seeing a static snapshot of what the system state was like when you loaded the page, it now dynamically updates you with the latest information so you can keep the pulse of your installations. For all the situations where you had to go from step a to step d through steps b and c, we've created shortcuts so that the process does not get in your way at all anymore. Also, you can now reset the password on an existing site and be logged into that site within three clicks, instead of having to wait for emails and so forth.

Fortunately, the existence of Drush make has allowed us to start using more complex contributed modules than we would ever have been able use before, without making it more daunting to install hostmaster. The days of hunting through Drupal.org and individually downloading and assembling all your dependencies is near an end, and with these chains no longer on us, we can finally start to get creative.

As we've pretty much met our goals for this alpha release, we will be cleaning it up and discovering edge cases and bugs over the next week so before making our Alpha 3 release. After that, as a project we are migrating to using git for development and will also likely work on getting releases of Drush make and Drush out of the door, as we depend on these utilities a lot now.

Follow @aegirproject on twitter to keep up to date with all the exciting new developments in the Aegir community.