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.

This year is going to be a bumpy one, but we're all pulling together and doing some great stuff. We just pushed another release of our bryghtbase codebase to our Bryght Light mass hosting service. It's the Drupal 5 release you get when you push signup, or the default install when you have one of our production hosting virtual private servers.

I've been breaking my head on install profiles. We naturally want to set up a bunch of stuff "out of the box". Now that Drupal 5 has "native" install profiles, we can work with the codebase directly, which makes things a lot easier. But, some things are still too hard. Basically, we need to make a library of CRUD functions for Drupal. Some of these may make it into future releases, ideally. For now, I've started scavenging some of the custom functions we've written in the past (e.g. one loops through profile fields and creates them -- see https://svn.bryght.com/dev/browser/bryghtbase/DRUPAL-5/trunk/html/profil...), and will be working with the community to standardize them.

Next up: planning for a Community profile and thinking about what we might put in a ProBlogger one.

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).