Guys I am building a control panel for a company, its my first experience for such project (I am a back-end programmer, never even bothered to check what are control panels, and how they work). The main requirements of the client are
1- Domain availability check and assigning.
2- E-mail CREATION on each domain.
3- WEBSITE Hosting and related stuff.....
4- E-Shop.


From the above list task 1, 2 and 4 are clear but task 3 is a bit blurry. Before I ask the client about the details of this task, I myself want to know what the basic features of a control panel are.

Second thing I want to know is that, is there any free/open source PHP control panel available which provides all these functionality. I am more interested for task 1(domain checking and assigning). And if anyone here can guide me a bit, I will be thankful for him.


Thank you in advance.

ISPConfig (www.ispconfig.com) covers webhosting and that.

If you want to see the paid professional control panels, http://www.directadmin.com and http://www.cpanel.com are really big now a days.

Hi!
There are other open source control panels that may help you put the pieces together..a few come to mind:

Ravencore
Webmin
DTC

All three of these have source code available...and are made up of many, many programs. If you have ever built a mail server...you know the drill. Ok..start out with the MTA...then...oh..I need web access to mail...ok..let's see:

squrrelmail
horde

Oh...I need Imap support...etc...etc...

all the control panals..even Cpanel...are made up like this..lots of pieces.

Bryon