Hiya all!

I have been fooling around with a lot of open source tools to put together a end-user control panel and I have made decent progress with it. I am planning to release it GPL and I would like to know if any one will be interested in volunteering for
a. some CGI scripting
b. some skinning
c. beta testing

and ofcourse add more functionality! :)

If some one like jayglate or sailor can provide a low end server for the team to test things out that would also be wonderful! :D

My target system is FreeBSD, djbdns, qmail, vpopmail, courier-imap,mysql, proftpd and ofcourse our lovable Apache [1.3.27]

The functionality I have visualized and the status is given below

1. Email Management - Qmailadmin [& probably ezweb or ezmlmweb for mailing list mgt]

2. mySQL management - PHPmyadmin

[I] we need a script to allow a user to create mySQL databases

3. Statistics - awstats [can include analog and webalizer although I think they are not giving much info]

4. Custom Apache [the whole gamut of .htaccess functionality like custom error pages, SSI, hotlink protection, password protected directories etc.,] I have found a beau of a script in hotscripts called htedit() which does a wonderful job of pwd protection
I have the functional requirement for each of this, but I am not much of a scripter so some one helping with Perl CGI would be great!

5. File Manager - Again I found a superb file manager in hotscripts which is very functional and GPL.

6. Squirrelmail for webmail

7. Anything else you all can think of!

I dont think it would be a wise idea to let users create anonymous FTP or set cron jobs themselves

This is only the end user panel; and not a server administration environment like the venerable CPanel! The server still needs to be managed from the command line by the admin! ;)

Currently my customers are using this and they are all quite happy. But the disadvantage is that there is no single control panel and they have to log into each tool to do that job.

So one prime requirement would be to have a single sign on. I have thought of open LDAP but I think it is needlessly complicated. May be some one like cperciva or Tim Greer can advise on the best way to do this.

Please give me your feedback on this.. This is a fairly secure set up and if we set up su_exec and run the utilities in cgi-bin it should be secure.

Cheers
Balaji

I would love to see more on this - I can create some skins for you , if i feel the end product is worth my time (thats not an insult) its just ive done some skinning for projects before and they have turned out to die.

Thanks Matt!

I think we can finish the development and keep the skinning for the end..

I will help too. As for mail I think we can use exim + qpopper + mbeqwa (admin tool) <-- all of this on MySQL.

Also I can do beta testing and scripting (just basic)

Let me know!

Also I can work on Apache settings, especially on SuEXEC stuff.

Why not use qmail......

use qmail or die ! :)

why not exim? :D everyone is using what they like. I'm not against qmail and I used it before.

Miha.

Use exim :) And use the ports, that is the easiest. Then even n00bs should be able to run a CP. :D

heh, there is no problem with installing software, I agree. The problem in writing interface for it :cool:

Thanks a lot for the interest folks! What we need is a killer CGI scripter who will donate something like 50 -100 hours! ;)

MotleyFool - You'll find that a lot of people are more willing to say they will help then actually do anything. No offense to the people that offered, however, I've been working on a (free) control panel as well and we can't even find people to do skins, much less help program. Hopefully you'll have more luck! :D

comphosting,

I fully see where you are coming from. :)

It is sad and ironic that most dont want to write GPL code but expect bug free, high secure Operating Systems, DNS servers, Web servers , databases and everything!

I am just thinking that while everything is freely available for a unix host, it is a bit unfair that he/she should have to pay a lot of $$/mo for the control panel alone :(

Initially I started to bravely host without a cp [with only qmailadmin] and then added all these components on a need basis.

May be we should all pool our efforts and return something to the GPL community instead of just taking

Currently BCP is in a bit of a blah right now so It'd be great to do that. It's written in BCP, however, the entire backend is written to be modular, in otherwords, any of the backend code can be written in perl, php or python.

I won't go into details here but head over to clicdev.com to check stuff out :).

We did the same as you MotleyFool, started on plain boxes with qmail admin (which is actually great) started looking at making little scripts to do other things such as subdomains.. then we bit the bullet and switched all servers to ensim :)

Still interested in helping with an opensource panel as i know there will be a lot of people who didnt bite that bullet.