Drupal Camp Montreal

In the wake of Drupal Camps in Victoria and LA, BarCamp Vancouver and of course DrupalCon in Hungary, the undaunted Raincity Studios crew is now heading east to La Belle Province for Drupal Camp Montreal.

Raincity Studios' CEO, Robert Scales and Production Director, Francis Pilon are both making the trip to their home province of Quebec to collaborate with Drupalists this coming weekend, Oct. 3rd and 4th.

Bryght en Français

With a French version of the Bryght Drupal install profile in the works, I suspect they'll have a chance to share with Francophone Drupalists seeking hosting and configuration in their preferred language.

Drupalists Koumbit are hosting the event and have a great plan in mind. They describe themselves as "a non-profit organisation which promotes the use of free & open source software by community groups in Quebec, Canada ..." Sounds very cool.

Koumbit are working closely with our man in Africa, Adrian, on the development of Ægir - the evolution of Hostmaster - the open source Drupal mass deployment project which is at the heart of Bryght Drupal hosting (see Adrian's presentation at DrupalCon).

In the wake of the Bryght relaunch and Drupal Con Szeged, I am personally learning a lot about Ægir, the mass deployment system developed by Raincity/Bryght super-developer, Adrian and co-maintained by the Quebec-based non-profit Koumbit.

I will judiciously refrain from offering my commentary on this project and instead point you to some resources to help you learn where Ægir came from (Hostmaster is the short answer) and where it's going (awesome-land and beyond).

Here are the basics:

Ægir (pronounced "eager") is a new set of contributed modules for Drupal that aims to solve the problem of managing a large number of Drupal sites. It does this by providing you with a simple Drupal based hosting front end for your entire network of sites. To deploy a new site you simply have to create a new Site node. To backup or upgrade sites, you simply manage your site nodes as you would any other node.

To learn what's up, your first tour stops are the overview of the Ægir project on Drupal.org and Ægir group.