Asterisk: The Definitive Guide, 3rd Edition

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 success 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 components 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 ...