Ægir 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.

We’ve been successfully running multiple sites on a single development installation for several months.  Presently we only have a single site in production, but will likely be ramping up soon to roll out one or two others. Aegir should certainly help distribute administration of those sites.

Context sounds like another useful module. We currently use Panels module in Drupal 5 which has a very nice, yet somewhat limited, built-in context feature. I have a hate-love with Panels and would like to avoid using it in cases when I only need context without the accompanying box model.

Spaces module appears to go hand-in-hand with Context.

Spaces allows features (a blog, calendar, casetracker, shoutbox, gallery, etc.) to be enabled and customized in different configurations in different spaces…. Spaces features are essentially context definitions with some additional metadata. Once exported to code, spaces features can be bundled with exported views, implementations of the space settings class, and other niceties to create packaged, ready-to-go features.

Not exactly sure what that all means yet. It’s still in alpha for Drupal 6 only at this point.

FeedAPI is another developmentseed module we have been using. FeedAPI has been very handy for aggregating news from the likes of MedlinePlus, CDC, and others, and then turning those news items into nodes.  Nicely done.

Finally, the eXtensible Catalog Drupal Toolkit is not a developmentseed project, but one I’m anxiously awaiting any release of. Mlen-Too Wesley, one of the developers, gave a lightning talk in February at Drupal4LibCamp. There’s also a screencast. The XC Project just announced release of their OAI and NCIP Toolkits so hopefully the wait won’t be terribly long.

Lucky for you and me there is very good help available. Here’s what I used:

1. Jump to Step 4 of Rails Deployment and Installation at IT.Signals. You’ll need to customize your configuration with whatever ports and IP or server address you have. I also needed to create the tmp/pids directory inside my Bibapp installation directory. Replace [path to]/testapp with [path to]/[bibapp] as appropriate. Replace environment: production with environment: development if that’s how you roll.
2. Save your new mongrel_cluster.yml to the Bibapp config directory. Start up mongrel_rails cluster to make sure its working on all the ports you expect. Stop when you get to Step 5. We need to setup the cluster so that it will be restarted when the server is rebooted. At this point, we’re going to deviate from these instructions, but you may want to return to them later if you want load balancing across your cluster. Refer to the Nginx section in Step #5.
3. Copy the mongrel_cluster Recipe kindly provided by Joyent and paste it into a new XML document named mongrel_cluster.xml. As instructed, customize the <instance/> properties for your Bibapp install. Save this file to /var/svc/manifest/network/mongrel/ on your server. This file is known as a service manifest to SMF. Unix/Linux use etc/init.d and rc scripts for defining and administering services. Solaris 10 replaced this with a new framework known as SMF. SMF is well documented on Sun’s blog. The SMF Manifest Cheatsheet is another good reference to the manifest properties.
4. Jump to Step 3.4 Create service manifest of Convert legacy_run service without reboot. Run

      1: svccfg import [path to mongrel_cluster service manifest]

5. If successful cd to [bibapp] and proceed to Step 4 for enabling your newly installed mongrel_cluster service:

      1: svcadm enable mongrel/cluster:bibapp

As mentioned earlier, once you have your cluster running it makes sense to do some load balancing for your production environment.

Good luck!