Last week at DrupalCon Copenhagen Antoine Beaupre and I shared our plans for the 1.0 release of the Aegir hosting system. After the 0.4 release that we are currently working on, the project will start working towards a final 1.0 build, rather than head towards 0.5.

Our goal for Aegir has been to implement a hosting system with a stable documented API that provides a solid foundation for integration of other services. Once we hit the 0.4 release, we will have the infrastructure in place to support this. With our key goal met, we’ve begun determining our must have features for a 1.0 release.

##Going Drupal 7##

Aegir 1.0 will be built on Drupal 7. Due to the commoditized nature of hosting infrastructure, we felt it would be impractical to have a stable release that requires additional investment whenever the API changes during development. Therefore our primary goal is to rewrite Aegir’s user interface for Drupal 7 and release it as early as possible in the Drupal 7 lifecycle.

With this we hope to ensure that custom and contributed extensions to Aegir built for the 1.0 release will stay viable for as long as building Drupal 7 sites remains viable, allowing your investment in the platform to remain usable for upwards of two years.

##New features##

After focusing heavily on Aegir’s backend in previous releases, we will be turn our attention to the user interface for the 1.0 release. We want this release to be the most lickable version of Aegir yet, with many user interface and workflow improvements.

We plan to implement new functionality to ease and automate issues surrounding ‘Development to Staging to Production’ workflow problems felt by our users. We’ll further integrate with Drush make, allowing Aegir to subscribe to new releases and automatically download them when a new one becomes available. This will allow you to migrate sites to the latest version literally with a click of a button.

The 1.0 release will also focus heavily on interoperability. We will rebuild the hostmaster install profile to Kit specification, replace custom listing code with Views (something which is already in progress), and integrate more closely with Features, Context, and Spaces. This will simplify our code base and allow for useful functionality like the ability to create SSL sites per client and possibly integrate Open Atrium features with Aegir.

We are open to feature suggestions from our users for the 1.0 release. If you have a request that would improve your experience with Aegir, please send it to @aegirproject.

##Finalizing the 0.4 release##

We are close to wrapping up the 0.4 release cycle. Once we have completed DNS slave server support (master support already works), we will be feature complete and will start releasing betas in preparation for completing 0.4. We hope to have this functionality completed in the next few weeks.

Slides from the DrupalCon session Aegir: One Drupal to Rule them All are up, and we’ll post a link to a video of the session here once it’s online.