Yesterday Open Atrium 1.0 Beta 4 was released. I figured it was coming because I noticed it had been rolled out on community.openatrium.com already. I decided to through it into Aegir and give'r a quick spin.
This is NOT going to be an exhaustive comparison, just a quick first look. Also, Some stuff has already been talked about (like the theme) so I wont be talking about it.
Main Page
When you first login your taken to that main dashboard. Here are some quick differences I noticed:
There is a nice pop-out menu in the upper left corner.
The user link is now on the left instead of the right and is no longer 'lightbox' styled when you click on it.
The "My Groups" is now located inside the user pop-out.
OA now used the new easily customizable dashboard.
There is a fancy how to video in the main content section when you start it up.
I was moving a bunch of old old sites over to a new server the other day and thought i would make some changes to one of them... but realized I couldnt remember th User1 password. Ha, shows you how well I keep that site up-to-date hu. Now that its in Aegir, it will probably stay maintained better.
There are 2 errors I get all the time when importing existing sites. I verify my platform and when the site is trying to import, I get this error:
This one is pretty easy to figure out, I have the wrong database info in my settings.php file. I probably had my DB password wrong or forgot to capitalize some letter. ...Read more...
Since the release of Aegir 0.3 I've been using Drupals multisite configuration like crazy. Mainly because Aegir uses it but also because it just makes sense. Starting a site in multisite works great, but moving an existing site to multisite configuration can cause some problems.
For example, on a regular Drupal install the images and file uploads are stored in the "sites/default/files" directory. On a multisite install, the files/images are stored in "sites/example.com/files" directory. This causes a problem becuase the links to most images/files that are in content will point to the wrong location:
Links will look like: http://example.com/sites/default/files/myimage.jpg
The global redirect module is a must have for SEO on a Drupal site. It does a great job helping with drupals "duplicate content" issues and redirecting urls around your drupal install.
For example by default, drupal shows the same content for a both a url ending in a slash "/" or not ending with a slash:
mysite.com/node/36/
mysite.com/node/36
To drupal this is the same page, but to a search engine, these might be very different pages. ...Read more...
The nodewords module allows you easily set the meta tags on your site. Some features of this module are (quoted directly out of the documentation): ...Read more...
Aegir .4 Alpha 5 Came out last week and so I thought i would do a quick video for those VPS newbies out. Aegir really is sweet and if you are wanting to ever just test it, this is a good starting point for you.
This can be done w/ almost any linux VPS host. I chose to go with Burstnet for the screencast because they got decent reviews from web hosting forums and is DIRT cheap.
I would recommend Linode if you are looking for a good VPS host. I have a node w/ them and they have always been wonderful. Don't take my word for it, they have hundreds of reviews all over the web bragging them up.
