[asterisk-users] What web GUI are people happy with?

[David Gomillion]

On 10/16/07, shadowym <shadowym at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> I don't do text editing so please indulge me.  Why would someone want to
> do
> that when a GUI makes life so much easier?
>
> On a practical note, If someone was deploying 2 or 3 of these a week, most
> of which have 5-10+ extensions doing all kinds of fancy things like call
> queues, parking, forwarding, followme, voicemail to email etc. etc. how
> practical is it to type all this in by hand making sure to get ever single
> space, ".", ",", "{}", "[]" etc. exactly right which NEVER happens.  So
> then
> you have to spend more time debugging the conf files.
>
> Even with a bunch of pre-made templates it seems like an awful lot of
> unnecessary heavy lifting when a GUI can make it so much easier and
> efficient.



You're welcome to do it however you like. But please don't suggest that
using a GUI will make things more efficient. Someone with experience
scripting can easily write a system to generate a well-formed, valid .conf
file, with appropriate comments. I, for one, have done this.

The reason many seasoned Asterisk admins prefer using the .conf files
instead of using a GUI is that no GUI can possibly conceive of every way to
do something. So, at some point, if your PBX does anything interesting,
you're going to have to integrate your changes with what the GUI generated.
And not let the GUI stomp on the changes. But make sure everything will be
in contexts that can access what it should, and not access what it
shouldn't.

Now, as far as how practical it is to create the dialplan by hand, I can
tell you that it only takes about 2-3 minutes to full configure such a
simple PBX as you described. Most GUI systems take far longer than that to
install, much less configure. Also, I can more easily manage systems
remotely via SSH than through many of the GUIs out there.

So, as I said before, do whatever works best for you. But please don't
insinuate that editing configuration files cannot be a good idea.
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