Introducing Zero-Touch Drupal Product Provisioning

2 years ago I started working on a Drupal CMS distribution that makes it less painful to launch a fully configured Drupal website. Today we're proudly launching what I think is the best CMS installation experience you've ever seen. Pantheon and Acquia cloud might be great tools for people like me who work with Drupal on a daily basis but there is a huge community of people who need something more simple. Our goal was for users to install a fully configured and themed Drupal website, with fully configured CMS components and demo content without requiring any user interaction. In less than 5 minutes.

Our Deployment tool currently does the following on auto-pilot:

1. Runs tests to see if the receiving server ready for installation
2. Generates custom build of our CMS installation profile with only the CMS components you need
3. Uploads the files straight from sooperthemes.com to your server
4. Uses Drush to go through the entire installation on your server
5. Installs demo content

Looking For Drupal Hosting Partners

From a wider perspective, I see this kind of service as an answer for the Open Web to the more streamlined experiences provided by companies like Wix and SquareSpace. They are the walled garden alternatives for small businesses. In that light I want to integrate with as many great Drupal hosting providers as possible. The first Hosting partner I integrated is A2hosting, because they provide SSH and Drush automatically to all users. I'm looking for other hosting providers who offer this, if you know of or are such a company please let me know in the comments!

Our service launched in beta but theoritically this should work fine on an Drupal/Drush capable server. It doesn't matter if you run Apache with MySLQ or nginx with PostgreSQL, our software has only the following server requirements:

• Drupal capable stack
• Drush
• Rsync
• SSH with password authentication

Looking For Testers

This means you can try it out right now on your VPS development server, all you need to provide is an empty web directory and database. If you're trying this and can't get it to work on your Drupal/Drush capable server please let me know in the comments. We did a lot of testing but the variety of server configurations is so vast that I'm sure we can improve our software's compatibility. Just to be clear, you don't need to be a subscriber or even registered on sooperthemes.com to use this. As a guest user you cannot choose the premium themes in the form but you can install any configuration of our CMS distribution with the Glazed Free theme.

It has been an adventure developing this new deployment tool. If you are excited too please test it and let me know what you think!

In Other News: SooperThemes Rebranding. Glazed 2.4.10 and Carbide Builder 1.0.10 Released

This week I've also updated the SooperThemes logo. For the past year the sooperthemes.com website has reflected what our new product was: Completely new and finding out where it wants to go. Now the logo more reflects the values of simplicity, open source and friendliness. These are the values I want to embed in our products. The logo is much simpler than the old one. The openings in the O are for open source. And the last detail is the Happy e's. This little touch of Dutch Design is a tilted back lower case e, it was invented by Heineken and reminds of a laughing head.

Today you can also download the latest patch-level release of Glazed theme and Carbide Builder. These releases contain no new features, only bug fixes. See the Glazed CHANGELOG and Carbide CHANGELOG. We've also updated the YouTube background feature and put a usage example in the bottom of the Sections and Backgrounds demo page. Enjoy!