[Asterisk-Users] web management interface

[snacktime]

I'm finishing up a first version of a web interface for end users. It's
focus is specific for our own uses, but I plan on releasing it under an open
source license and would appreciate any feedback while I wrap up the first
version.

The interface is designed for end users without any real technical knowledge
of asterisk except for some basic concepts of how things relate to each
other. Such as contexts in a dialplan and how they relate to the context
assigned to a sip/iax user, etc.. The interface is for day to day management
of areas such as the dialplan and configuring new providers and phones in
sip.conf and iax.conf. Things that an end user would want to change on their
own. It also includes a nice voicemail interface for voicemail users, and
some ability to manage/monitor asterisk via the manager api.

One of the main features is the ability to write canned scripts that have
associated configuration pages. A script is a text file with the script, and
a YAML definition file. In the text file you can put variable placeholders,
and in the YAML file you define the variables. The web interface then builds
an html form based on the text file and the YAML definition. This way it's
easy to add configurable sections in extensions.conf without having to
change any of the base code. For instance providing canned scripts for
extensions, call routing, voice menu's, etc.. If you have a script that
needs a more custom web interface you can do that also by just creating the
html form by hand. The same template approach is also used for configuring
phones.

Since we will be using this for local and remote installations, we also
needed multi tenant capability. A basic multi tenant feature set is built
in, so multiple businesses can be maintained on one copy of asterisk.

Another requirement we had is to be able to coexist with an existing
asterisk installation, instead of requring that the management interface
take over all the asterisk config files. All you have to do with asterisk is
add one include line in each .conf file you want to manage.

And last but not least, another reason we couldn't use any of the existing
interfaces is that almost without exception all of them were too difficult
to install. Or more correctly unnecessarily difficult. We need to have
something we can hand our clients and know they will be able to install the
thing and run it with little difficulty. Since this interface uses ruby on
rails, it includes a built in webserver, and the installation is a matter of
untarring the distribution into a directory, changing the ownership of the
directory to something asterisk can read, and running the start script to
bring up the webserver. If we can work out a bug in tar2rubyscript that
makes it fail on freebsd, then the distribution will be just one single
executable that you can run as is.


I would be very interested in hearing about what features people would like
in a tool like this. Keeping in mind that it's not a complete asterisk
system and is designed to work with existing installations. I will post a
live demo in the next week or so once we get the first release ready.

Chris
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.digium.com/pipermail/asterisk-users/attachments/20051026/f0cdec06/attachment.htm