Hosting control panel

Dreamhost is great hosting provider, but it lacks one simple thing to be perfect :) it is user control panel
ME and my friends have some idea how to bild one using PHP and curl function and cron jobs ....

Idea goes something like this
1. You install this application on your main domain
2. you give privileges and other to your users trough web panel and store data to mysql database
3. Your users are able trough there panel to add domains, sub domains, mail accounts, databases and etc (as much as you alow them, using your admin part of script) they requests are stored in database
4. And now the tricky part ....
Once a day your script connects to panel.dreamhost.com
using your user name and password, and posts data for processing (it automates process like you did it by hand)

For example https://panel.dreamhost.com/index.cgi?tree=mail.addresses¤t_step=Index&next_step=New
and POST alias=yourmailname, domain="@yourdomainname",
gecos="mailboxname"
passwd1="pass"
passwd2="pass"

end etc


First thing is it ok regarding your agreement and other policies to create this script
I have not found any problem in this

There are two "working" examples of doing parts of this as a "proof of concept" posted on these forums - one to add an email forwarding address, and another to add a domain/subdomain, using PHP.

To me, the biggest drawback to doing something like this, from a technical standpoint, is that since there is no formal API, changes in the DH Panel system are likely to break functionality, necessitating rewriting stuff.

--rlparker

Yeah, I'd suggest creating a three tier service-based architecture. The panel itself could call a web-service layer which would be the API to which your website would code. The actual panel front-end would be written on top of this API as well.

To keep it simple, they could use ReST instead of a heavyweight protocol like SOAP.

Are you willing to participate in this kind of project?
If we document this software and create it as Object oriented and modular, any future rewrites , would be quick and simple ...

And I think that we will be supported by Dream host community

We could develop small web panel for dreamhost and small panel for general use

where are these examples? I didn't see them.

nevermind

they're here (one links to the other):

http://discussion.dreamhost.com/showthreaded.pl?Cat=0&Board=forum_troubleshooting&Number=89849&Search=true&Forum=All_Forums&Words=curl panel&Match=And&Searchpage=0&Limit=25&Old=allposts&Main=89833