16-19 July 2015: NYC Drupal Camp, Aegir Summit and CiviCRM turn-key hosting

For those of you in the New York City area, 16-19 July 2015 is NYC Drupal Camp (pronounced "nice camp"), an annual grassroots non-profit conference run by volunteers. The event covers a broad range of topics related to Drupal. As part of the camp, the developers of the Aegir hosting system have organised the first Aegir Summit, 16-17 July.

For those not familiar with Aegir: it is a control panel based on Drupal and Drush to help automate the installation of Drupal, typically in a multi-site architecture (1 code base, many independant sites). With the provision_civicrm module, Aegir can also automate the installation of CiviCRM. This means that with a few clicks, you can create a new database, install Drupal and CiviCRM, configure the web server and optionally manage the SSL certificate. It also helps to automate other tasks, such as backups, upgrades and cloning. Need to create a new testing site for a client? Two clicks and it's ready. If you often create the same types of sites: create a model site, then clone it everytime you need a new instance.

There are also plans to support WordPress in Aegir. I have been working on a prototype that uses the command line tool wp-cli instead of Drush. If you would like to try it, please keep it mind that it is highly experimental and requires patching Aegir 3 (which is still in beta, although there are Debian/Ubuntu packages). The code is available here: hosting_wordpress (please read the 'Readme' file for installation notes).

If you are into Docker and other types of farming, you might find the Aegir Summit interesting as well. There has been a lot of talk about moving Aegir to a more Docker/container-friendly architecture in the next phase, for example.

Long story short: if you are in the NYC area, it would be great to see you there. If you cannot make it and you are interested in any of the above, feel free to leave a comment on this blog post or contact me by e-mail: mathieu at symbiotic.coop.

If you are a CiviCRM hosting provider and you would like to provide a self-serve online form so that your future users can test your services and create a new CiviCRM instance, that's possible too. Hopefully we will have a demo on time for the Aegir Summit, but in the mean time, I will leave the following teaser below (and yes, the sign-up form is a CiviCRM form!) :-)