mig5.net
Building Drupal applications with drush_make, provisioning sites with Aegir
I did a screencast on how you can use Drush Make to generate 'builds' based on Drupal core, with optional components such as install profiles + module/theme/library dependencies. The example given is the Managing News news aggregation system.
I then show how you can add the build as a Platform in Aegir, and rapidly provision sites on it in a multisite structure.
Aegir development switches to Git. Some further details
Shameless 'retweet' of Adrian's article announcing Aegir's move from CVS to Git for our development.
Those of you who have been cloning from my git repos at git.mig5.net, may now wish to clone from the officially-supported git repos at git.aegirproject.org. The Issue queues for reporting bugs will for the time being remain at d.o.
Community Feature Server is available
After noticing that in the community, some people are seeking a central community 'hub' Feature Server via which to upload and share their Features, I bought featureservers.org and set up http://community.featureservers.org to do exactly that.
Five second Feature Server with drush_make + my install profile
Sorry, I couldn't resist :)
While I was writing my article on how to do deployments and workflow with Drush_make and Aegir, it occurred to me that once upon a time, I wrote an Installation Profile to build a Feature Server using the fserver feature itself, with the other required components such as Features, CCK, Views, etc per Development Seed's Recipé.
Drupal deployments & workflows with version control, drush_make, and Aegir
It's the million dollar question. And it's rarely been answered because it's so darn hard to do so.
Today I'd like to tell you how I do it with my favourite deployment weapons: Aegir, Version control, and Drush Make.
An introduction to the Aegir Hosting system
Tonight at 18:30pm GMT+11 I'll be giving a talk/presentation on 'An Introduction to the Aegir Hosting system' at the regular monthly Melbourne Drupal meet @ the Emspace offices.
My notes during the last week kind of took on a life of their own, and so in anticipation of the talk, I thought I'd publish them here, despite the somewhat casual tone, for those who can't make it and want a somewhat (perhaps overly, for an Introduction!) detailed overview of the Aegir system and what it does.
Developing with Git and working with drupal.org's CVS on a central git server
I thought I'd document the steps I did to set up a central git repository to which I can push to and pull from for various projects (including the Aegir components), as well as have the repositories sync from the CVS repository on drupal.org regularly.
Before I begin: I'm normally quite verbose and careful with my howtos. However, due to most unwelcome Nagios alerts at 3am on a Sunday morning, I've been awake for about 19 or 20 hours straight. Apologies for any errors with the following instructions, or steps I've missed :)
git.mig5.net is available
I've finally found some time to sort out my Git repos and get them together on one of my servers as a central location to pull from and push to.
Ægir and other interesting videos are up on archive.org
Ægir users or people interested in the project might be interested to know that the recent Paris DrupalCon videos are starting to show up on archive.org.
Available are Adrian and Anarcat's presentation Automate your site maintenance troubles away with the Aegir hosting system as well as Aegir - Build once, deploy often: Real life use cases by Roel De Meester.
Migrate your Drupal sites to a new Drupal core security release with Ægir
Drupal core security updates are fortunately not a very regular occurence, but they've been notorious for making site managers or system administrators weak at the knees thinking about the potential risk or pain in upgrading.. even though it is usually pretty straightforward!
Let's face it, no-one likes having to rip out their sites directory and move it around into a new core, run all the updates etc. It's not fun, and you'd rather be busy improving your awesomeness somewhere else.
Get into the Aegir and Drupal deployment/build magic at DrupalCon Paris 2009
I'm sorry to not be able to attend the Paris 2009 DrupalCon this year, which starts in only some hours time.
Drupal.org improves caching for better performance
This post by Narayan Newton didn't make it into my aggregated High Availability/Performance categories in my Reader, but I picked this up from Dries on Twitter and though it's light on details, is an interesting read.
Drupal's got issues: too many ticketing / case modules :)
Support. Casetracker. Storm. Project. Trouble Ticketing System. Comment CCK.
Hooray for opensource, and the ability for many people to spend a lot of effort trying to achieve the same end!
Feature Server and install profile for Drupal
Development Seed have released alpha versions of their Feature Server, which, ironically (and I believe) is a feature in itself.
We had wind of the approaching goodness in this blog post by Young Hahn. Now the code, and also the theme(s) which is nice!, are available for download from http://code.developmentseed.org.