Page 275 - Asterisk™: The Future of Telephony

(uncreatively) the Asterisk GUI. Rather than developing a single GUI, Digium developed
different GUIs and a framework to trivialize the creation and modification of GUIs for
different segments.
A second goal was to make sure that the GUI interacted with Asterisk’s traditional con-
figuration methods in a way that did not preclude someone from using them. Most GUIs
for Asterisk use an intermediate configuration format or database, then spit out configs
for Asterisk to use. Unfortunately that means that any option that is not presented within
the GUI cannot be “manually” set in the configuration files. By contrast, the Asterisk
GUI actually modifies your traditional Asterisk configuration files, meaning that your
changes in the GUI and your changes to the files themselves can co-exist and even flow
back and forth. As an example, if you change the caller ID for a user in users.conf then
refresh the GUI, you’ll see the change in the GUI as well. Likewise if you change it in the
GUI and reload the file, you’ll see the change in the file. If you add new settings that are
not presented in the GUI (for example if you add nat=yes to a particular entry in
users.conf, then change the caller ID in the GUI, you’ll see that the nat=yes line will remain
in the file even though the caller ID change goes through. Comments are also generally
preserved across GUI edits. This means that not only is the GUI no longer required to
display all possible configurations, since esoteric ones can be set manually. This also
means that when someone starts by using the Asterisk GUI and then outgrows it, there
is a natural path for them to be able to start creating more sophisticated functions without
abandoning the GUI with which they’re familiar.

Using the GUI

When you first log in to a newly created GUI, the system walks you through a wizard
that lets you set up the basic elements of your phone system.

The GUI may not be able to detect all types of TDM interfaces, and thus
may report that it cannot find any cards even though you have some
installed. It is expected that the GUI will eventually be able to detect
and manage any cards that use the Zaptel interface, but this function-
ality is going to be complex, and is still in development at this time.

The wizard walks you through some basic settings such as extension length and dialing
rules. We are not going to get into detail on how the default GUI works. It is in constant
development, and what we write about here is not likely to be what you will experience
when you read this.

GUI elements

The standard GUI that comes with AsteriskNOW (or can be downloaded via SVN) has
a standard set of elements that represent the sorts of things a typical small office PBX
might want. The menu items are currently:
• Users
• Conferencing
• Voicemail

What Is the GUI? | 247