Last week the Aegir project released the latest alpha in the 0.4 release cycle. The most important features of this release are compatibility oriented, and we now have working support for Drupal 7 installs and upgrades, as well as support for upgrading from Open Atrium Beta 3 and Managing News Beta 6, both of which will have new releases due out in the next few weeks.

All users of the 0.4 alpha release, and all users who are managing Open Atrium or Managing News installations with Aegir, are recommended to upgrade to the new release, which is very stable and can be used for production installations. Instructions on how to upgrade to the latest release of Aegir are here.

One of our core developers, mig5, prepared a very useful screencast that illustrates how to install the new alpha.

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=9127281&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=1

Installing Aegir 0.4 alpha5 from mig5 on Vimeo.

For those joining this sprint already in progress, we had gotten a working front end with merged server node types (see this issue and the dev-server_nodetype branch on git.aegirproject.org) before we were diverted by the need to release Aegir to facilitate new releases coming out from our other projects. All that’s left to close that issue is to change how the front end values map to the backend to bring them in synch again, and to modify the install wizard so it sets up the new types correctly.

After that’s completed and the front end changes are merged back into the master branch, we’ll start working on the next phase — to make a new task for ‘server verify’. The big thing this will mean is restructuring our commands so they don’t bootstrap quite as much and can run without Drupal present at all. We’ll also be figuring out where to store the information on a server level.

The server verify task is a blocker for a great many other issues, and once we have that in place we will tackle a bunch of those related issues. Specifically, I know there’s a lot of interest in introducing a mechanism for regular backups, which have been missing before since we didn’t have anywhere to communicate with the backend on a ‘server wide’ context, which means we couldn’t invalidate old backups.

We’ll probably do another alpha release in about two weeks after the server verify task is in. Before that, however, I will likely branch off a dev branch in git to start work on refining the backend for the new API. This is also where I will start to look at introducing a ‘file service’ for transferring the files between servers.