Sorry for the late notice, but I wanted to mention that we've got a planning session for HostMaster development this morning at 9AM PDT via IRC -- Djun just posted this HostMaster roadmap on groups.drupal.org:

This is a brief outline of development plans for HM2 over the next few weeks. Planning at the weekly level will happen in the #hm2 room for irc.freenode.net, Fridays at 9:00AM PDT. Now that the first release is out, we will be revving pretty rapidly to get the bug fixes in, and to make this more usable. For the next few weeks, the focus will be:

• Fix bugs and make release solid for Drupal 5.x platform
• Enable minor-version upgrades, e.g. Drupal 5.1 -> Drupal 5.2
• Enable major-version upgrades e.g. Drupal 5x -> Drupal 6x

This will be the target for the 1.0 final release, 3rd or 4th week of June.

The meetings will continue to be Friday mornings, and please also join the HostMaster group to ask questions or help contribute to documentation.

Big shout out to Koumbit for working with us on this. We are looking for more co-maintainers, so if you have lots of server experience and an interest in mass hosting with a web-based, Drupal native control panel, come check it out.

The majority of us here at Raincity Studios run MAMP when working locally on projects or for a testing environment. Being introduced to the awesomeness that is Drush yesternight, I went to giver' a try on my local machine.

What is Drush you say?

Drush allows you to easily manage, update, and maintain your modules via command line without having the need to keep a CVS cheat sheet laying around.

In this walkthrough, we'll go through the process of getting Drush working on your local machine, assuming you are running MAMP.

Well, it's about time.

Dries is finally done with his PhD work, and is kicking off Acquia, his commercial Drupal startup company. Dries' write up is fairly extensive, but there is also a FAQ on the Acquia site.

Dries explains that Acquia will focus on "Drupal distributions". I'd like to think that myself and the team at Bryght pioneered the concept of Drupal distributions: we've been running them as part of our mass hosting system since January 2005. It took a few more years to get "install profiles" into the core of Drupal, with the release of Drupal 5. There is still a ton of work to be done in improving the base infrastructure / code / APIs for install profiles, but it's the right direction.

As has been seen all over the web, Drupal turns 6 years old today, and is celebrating not only with cookies, but also with the release of Drupal 5.

Uwe Hermann was the first person I saw mention that Drupal shares this birthday with Wikipedia. Very cool!

Of course, at Bryght, we've been heavily involved in many things around this release, both as part of the community as well as getting many of our systems here prepped to do some new things. As I talked about in my post on mass hosting, Drupal 5 features install profiles: something that we envisioned three years ago and is the concept around which we built our Hostmaster code.

Our Hostmaster code now supports Drupal 5 install profiles natively. This means that any install profile created for a "regular" Drupal install can be mass hosted. It also means that we can build "native" profiles once using the rich variety of modules available, and then offer them point-and-click style in shared hosting, or make them available to VPS customers via SVN. And by VPS customers, I mean anyone -- you can kick the tires on our (very) Basic profile that we've put together as a Drupal 5 Preview Release (I wrote a bit more on groups.drupal.org). You'll see some more news on that from us tomorrow, when we "officially" bring all the Drupal 5 stuff live.

Bryght started with a simple idea: what if we could take a powerful, complex framework like Drupal and make it available to everyone... with or without technical expertise. This was closely related to our belief that eventually static HTML pages on the Internet will be replaced by dynamic pages. Dynamic pages means web applications.

We've seen a lot of this occur over the past several years. When we started, Drupal was making the transition from Drupal 4.4 to 4.5. Multisite was just a glimmer in people's eyes, and the concept of install profiles was nowhere to be seen. Bryght worked on Drupal core to include multisite capability out of the box: all of a sudden, it was a bug if a module didn't support operating in a multisite environment.

Drupal-as-framework was in a much different state back then. Developers constantly hit cases where the core code didn't have enough "hooks and interfaces" to cleanly override everything. We ended up building a series of tools and daemons around Drupal in order to enable mass hosting. This tool is called HostMaster, and is Bryght's answer to mass hosting Drupal. It's built around Python and PostgreSQL, and has had the concept of "install profiles" for about 2 years. We originally had dreams of perhaps licensing or otherwise making money directly off this code. But in reality, this concept is foreign to our open source beliefs: the bits don't matter. Eventually, we put HostMaster under the GPL and made it available at https://svn.bryght.com/hostmaster (yes, you still need to request an account).