My company Retrix Hosting is soon going to begin developing a Control Panel for our customers. We would like to know what features would be ideal in a Control Panel. Currently all user set up is done by hand (aka vi), and scripts (in a FreeBSD environment).

We would like our users to easily administrate (or view) their Email setting, Web, FTP, Passwords, Database, and Invoices.

We will be using PHP and MySQL to develop the software, with help from good old shell scripts. Has anyone developed or used this type of software, and what problems or issues did you run into?

Any help or advice or encouragement would be greatly appreciated!

This topic has been brought up many times, please search for this.

my suggestion would be to get a copy of h sphere, plesk, cpanel and ensim and use them. Get feedback on the best and worst features of each then incorporate the best ones into your panel.

We would like to know what features would be ideal in a Control Panel.


This is the only question I can really answer as I have never developed a control panel :)

You should probably check out all the popular control panels.

www.cpanel.net (easy to use, lots of features)
www.hostgui.com (looks awesome but who knows when it will be released)
www.ensim.com (incredibly solid in my experience)
www.plesk.com (never used this)

Personally, if you are interested, I would like to see the security and good coding of the Ensim control panel with the easy and features of CPanel.

Good luck on your control panel!

Forget trying to look at hostgui its not even released and might never will be. Look at h sphere instead, http://psoft.net It is the only control panel that currently has billing and support ticket system built in plus a host of other features.

With the release and growing of Helm and H-sphere the need for a new panel has decreased greatly if you ask me...

Helm is excellent panel, but has no linux version..
H-sphere is very impressive, but does not have the complexity of Helm yet.. I would say that an H-Sphere type panel with one time fee's and maybe a few more additions like sub-resellers would be liked.

H Sphere already has one time fee's. So if we can get them to add the sub reseller section are you saying its the most impressive? ;)

all current control panels are fundamentally flawed. the way it *should* work is that config files should be parsed completely and understood completely by the control panel, as opposed to the control panel performing substitutions on the configs which depends on their state which may have been modified manually.

parse configs into xml, that way you can write the core functionality once and just code parsers for each software package. if you were able to provide postfix and pureftpd support, i for one would definitely purchase the control panel.

cheers,
paul

its one thing to say that all control panels should read the config files, but its 10000x harder to make it work. How will the control panel know what belongs to who and how things interact and what to do with extra information etc...

this is technically viable, a model must be constructed that respresents the server as a system with components and users that interact with each other. rup/uml anyone? =]

it is no simple feat and may not be financially viable as it would require a rather legthy design phase. i did not mean to suggest that that is the route to take, but merely stating what i would like in the ideal world. obviously, practical considerations may make implementation prohibitive.

cheers,
paul