System information

CHAPTER 25
Web Interfaces
A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when
substituted for insight and understanding.
—Marshall McLuhan
Before you get too excited, this chapter is not going to talk about dialplan configuration
GUIs such as FreePBX or Digium’s Asterisk-GUI. We recognize that much of the suc-
cess of Asterisk is due to the success of FreePBX-based projects such as AsteriskNOW,
Trixbox, and PBX in a Flash, but in this book our focus is on Asterisk. As such, we will
not be discussing any GUIs that essentially remove your relationship with the dialplan.
It’s not that we’re against these things, but simply that we have only so much space in
this book, and our goal is to look at Asterisk from the bottom up. Most Asterisk GUI
projects hide the inner workings of Asterisk behind an interface, and for this reason
they are not compatible with the goals of this book.
Our discussion of Asterisk web interfaces, therefore, will focus on interfaces to com-
ponents other than the dialplan.
The FreePBX Dialplan GUI
Now that we’ve promised not to talk about dialplan interfaces, we feel it would be
wrong to say nothing at all about FreePBX, the juggernaut of the Asterisk community.
This interface (which is at the heart of many of the most popular Asterisk distributions,
such as AsteriskNOW, PBX in a Flash, and Trixbox), is unarguably a very large part of
why Asterisk has been as successful as it has. With the FreePBX interface, you can
configure and manage many aspects of an Asterisk system without touching a single
configuration file. While we purists may like everyone to work only with the config
files, we recognize that for many, learning Linux and editing these files by hand is simply
not going to happen. For those folks, there is FreePBX, and it has our respect for the
important contributions it has made to the success of Asterisk.
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