Abstract
Web hosting control panels allow administrators to easily manage web servers in many different ways. Current control panels have many limitations, such as restrictive, non-free licenses, confusing interfaces, are outdated, or are hard to install. The purpose of this project is to create a community-driven control panel without such limitations, and to provide the user with an alternative choice. One key idea is that this project will help bring more users to Fedora in the future.
The purpose of this idea is to write a webhosting control panel, 100% compatible with Fedora and Enterprise Linux, written in python and licensed under a GPL compatible license.
The control panel will be able to add/remove domains, manage apache, ftp, postfix email with dovecot(imap, pop3s, smtps) , dns, mysql, phpmyadmin, and will have roundcube as webmail.
Detailed Description.
This project will be done in 2 parts.
Part 1 -> a webpage to add records into a database, when a email account is created a record will be inserted into database, when another mail account is removed the record will be deleted from database.
Part 2 -> scripts to complete the tasks in linux, for example, one script will read the email accounts table and adjusts the postfix settings to make the email account works.
Importance
alot of people are hosting websites into the cloud (amazon, linode, rackspace and others). People need a free and easy to install control panel, just yum and pray and you're done.
What do we need to do?
1 - write a database schema, and make a webpage for it.
2 - write scripts to read the database and perform the tasks on Linux.
3 - make the webpage communicates with the scripts for automatically setup.
4 - package it and make it available into fedora/fedora epel respository's
Proposed Schedule
Week 1: do some research, setup a git repository for this project,
Week 2: make a database schema
Week 3: draw up a basic interface of how the web panel should look as well.
Week 4: write a webpage for the database according with layout designed in previous week
Week 5: make sure webpage works, test it, fix bugs
Week 6: write scripts to setup apache, ftp, create email accounts etc..
Week 7: make sure scripts are working, test it, fix bugs
Week 8: make webpage communicates with the scripts and setup the things automatically.
Week 9: start packaging it for fedora and fedora-epel
Week 10: submit it for review
Week 11: get it approved.
Week 12: Launch it.
About me
My name is Itamar Reis Peixoto and I am a student of Computer Science at the Instituto Federal do Triangulo Mineiro - Uberlandia, Brazil. I am one of the Brazilian Ambassadors, package maintainer and I have been working on it for a long time, dont remember when I have started. As ambassador I have attended fudcon panama, also I am responsible for having fedora release party`s in my city. I have been involved in fedora for a long time. So, I feel able to work on this application.
If you need more information, please contact me.