With 2012 over, were now approaching a full year of development of what started out as a pet project of mine: DevShop.

Development environments are complicated. There are a lot of moving parts. This is why services such as Pantheon and Acquia Hosting are so popular.

I've always used Aegir, since about version 0.3, because I loved that it removed the complexity of creating databases and users, secure passwords, settings.php files, apache vhosts, and file permissions. This frees you up to focus on the site at hand. However I noticed over the years, that despite the things aegir takes off your plate, maintaining all of the sites, files, and users that a even a small development team requires is a lot of work!

DevShop got started as most good ideas do, as something else entirely. I started just building add-ons to the "hosting" project, one piece at a time. As I began down the path of extending Aegir, and researching what others had already done, I realized that there were a lot of tools but no plans and no standard way to organize your Shop! Soon after I created hosting_features I realized that I needed to build a larger project, one that includes everything I can think of to build an enhanced Drupal development environment.

With 2013 off to a very fast start, I am determined to focus more on infrastructure than ever. I am also going to be promoting and documenting DevShop as best I can to try and build more community support. Starting with a breakdown of what we accomplished this past year. Like I said, there are so many moving parts, its easy to lose track. Stay tuned as I follow through on my New Year's resolution to write more and more about what we've been building, and what my vision of a perfect development system looks like.

May 2013 be the year we finally stop sweating about Drupal infrastructure!

Tags: devshopPlanet Drupal