I am referring to Plesk and Ensim type implementation. All email account holders can access an email only control panel so that they can control their own spam setttings, auto responders, mail groups, mail lists, change their passwords etc. This is a very important feature these days for organizations.
Some (not all) of these things can be done via webmail.
You can already manage:
Spam Settings
Vacation messages
Password changing
via the provided webmail (horde) client.
Paul
Well that is a start, but it would be far more preferable and usable if there was an additional level to the system for email users. They could select their theme, language, etc. This really is a big competetive advantage of Plesk. They really handle this aspect of a control panel well. I’m not saying it is the end all, but it has tremendous use for small businesses and organizations. There are a lot of people who do not like Horde(I like Horde a lot:). But at least something is in place.
Rldev,
How does it work in Plesk? Are there two seperate login areas, one for webmail, and another for the “e-mail control panel”? I’d hate to have even more places for people to have to log in to.
I like horde as well, but I know some folks don’t. Squirrelmail is also provided as a webmail option (which I don’t like :)), where you can set SpamAssassin options and change your password as well.
I imagine I’m just not seeing the whole picture here, maybe I’ll understand more after I investigate further.
Paul
Well for those who do not like Horde, they also havee Squirrelmail 
But in all seriousness I do agree with this point. I would like to see any email or ftp user be able to log into SiteWorx and change their password and edit specific other settings for themselves. Yeah, I can see how this could be complicated when it comes to spam settings and such.
holy heck, i didn’t notice that I was logged in to the BB under my partners’ login from when he used my laptop last!
Reposting on the right username. Sorry about that.
The Real Jerricho –> Holy cow, you account hacker!!! 
How does it work in Plesk? Are there two seperate login areas, one for webmail, and another for the “e-mail control panel”? I’d hate to have even more places for people to have to log in to.
I’ll keep my plesk/sw-soft comments to myself…
Anywho, what he’s referring to is at the point where you log in to plesk for domains/resellers/whatever, you can also log in with any email address on the system, then set various options and settings for that email address.
However, I think that this kind of stuff is covered pretty well through the horde interface…
As far as frontpage goes, I think that we could get something hammered out without too much difficulty. With the hacking I’ve done in the last few days I think i’ve gleened a pretty good grasp of how the system works. If we abandon the actual frontpage “admin” site that would normally be used to set up the domains and itegrate those into iworx, then it’s just a matter of copying the files to where they need to go (easy enough), and putting the right things into the frontpage configuration files. Heck, there’s not even any apache configuration to actually change! (It’s all done in .htaccess files)
The trick would be making sure that the web-admin for the individual sites still works, because that would be necessary to consider any frontpage support “full”. I say this because from the frontpage software many menu items will take you to the frontpage web admin for the domain. Unless, of course, we hijack that and built it right in to interworx… that would probably be a much more in depth project though.
I’m pretty busy with work, but I would certainly like to work with the IWorx staff on getting FrontPage support integrated, mostly so I can buy a license for another company I work with (frontpage support is a requirement for that application) - it’ll have probably 250 domains on it too!
What do I need to do to work with the iworx staff on this? Should we start another thread for development, or is there a development mailing list you could add me to for the development process?
I also have anothe feature to request:
SMTP-SSL (Port 465) Support. It’s getting more and more common for ISP’s to block port 25 to all mail servers but their own as an anti-spam mesure. I support this - it has done a lot to reduce the volume of spam on the internet. However some users still need to send directly out using their hosted server. SMTP-SSL is the only option for this that’s supported within email software (Outlook, Outlook Express, Thunderbird, and Eudora all have native support for doing this). I’ve set it up with qmail-smtpd once a while back on a dev server and it wasn’t /too/ difficult.
I think since a site admin can setup additional users with restricted rights already, it should not be a big deal for email account holders to be able to log into an email only control panel. I don’t see how this is confusing. It is actually very logical. But I can live without this for a little while. I rather have Mail Man or something better in the email section of the control panel right now. And yes FrontPage is absolutely a deal breaker for me. This must be in the cp.
I couldn’t have said this better myself…
I can live without this for a little while. I rather have Mail Man or something better in the email section of the control panel right now. And yes FrontPage is absolutely a deal breaker for me. This must be in the cp.
Well MUST is a strong word here, but it is a huge selling factor.
Why does Microsoft have to be so difficult. What do the FP ext. do anyway?
Is it any better than using notepad or dreamweaver? 
As I recall, with FP2003, they have done away with FPE because it was too big a nightmare for them to handle.
Hmm, I wasn’t aware of that. I have FP 2003 and it need FPE in order to publish and do the special things. As for FP, it is not a matter if it is good or bad or something is better. A lot of people use it.
My question was why does a webserver need something special for creating HTML pages? Or is like a like a special MS FTP server for uploading files or something? My question is why is it needed, not why people use it?
No, they just merged them with Share Point Team Services. But I suppose the results are the same.
You can create standard HTML documents with FrontPage and publish them to a website via FTP yes.
What the extentions add are the ability to do many things server side without having to install the scripts manually such as counters, form handlesrs, forums, themes, sitemap/replace only changed pages, etc.
I used to use FrontPage all the time but now use DreamWeaver most of the time now for almost anything I do with html.
FrontPage is good for writing text documents in html because it uses Word’s language features (for example all of my tutorial docs are written in FrontPage). BUT it is code bloat for anything that uses tables (height= in the table, cell, row, etc when not needed) and other more complex formatted pages. Or if you paste text out of something else it uses style tags to try to match the original apperance. YUCK!
Anyway FrontPage is nice for newbies but once you learn more about html and how to use your own or downloaded scripts and such it’s a waste IMHO.
BUT many people who are doing web hosting are targeting these newbies and for that reason FrontPage extentions are a huge selling point.
[quote]
What do I need to do to work with the iworx staff on this? Should we start another thread for development, or is there a development mailing list you could add me to for the development process?
[quote]
You can just continue to update the other FP thread that was going on:
http://interworx.info/forums/showthread.php?t=754
Chris
I’ll continue working on the frontpage stuff. I really think we can get it integrated into the CP. What happens when you “Extend” a web is actually pretty simple. It copies a pre-defined set of directories, sets up some .htaccess files, as well as the htpasswd and group files to go with it, then writes a configuration file to /usr/local/frontpage/version5.0. As far as I can tell, that’s it. Any further postings regarding that, from me, will go to the frontpage thread in the hacks forum.
In the way of educating those who were asking questions about frontpage, I’ll state this as being how it works to the best of my knowledge (i.e. I might not be 100% correct):
Frontpage extensions use CGI GET/POST to communicate with a CGI binary on the server. This binary does things like control access, set up scripts and “bots” as frontpage calls them, as well as allow you to upload files. I am not familier with exactly how the frontpage server side binary does all of these things, but I know that the client communicates with the server using pure HTTP requests.
The reason behind frontpage is “ease of use” for those who don’t know /how/ to do things more advanced. In my opinion it is designed as a beginners’ tool. Also in my opinion, the client side is quite good at being just that. It may generate some bloated code sometimes, but in all it’s not really that bad. The bad part, again IMO, is the server side extensions. They are VERY easy to break. That’s where the problem comes in with frontpage. Making sure that the system can repair the mess, if the user breaks it.
The FP2003 / Sharepoint topic that was brought up above was a little out of kilter too. What’s happened with that is that MS has simply renamed (and significantly enhanced) frontpage, it’s now SharePoint instead of Front Page. It’s capable of much more, as well. But, it depends heavily on Windows functions to be what it is - thus it will never exist for Unix. According to RTR all support (and even downloads of the software!) will cease on June 30, 2006. I’ve already made backup copies of everything I can get my hands on from their site, for future use after that date.
Having worked with Sharepoint on a windows 2003 server for a client, I can say my experiance was that they’ve only made it even more complex and breakage-prone.
However, supporting front-page 2002 extensions is a high enough level for the market we are in. If someone wants SharePoint services, they are probably going to have their own server to run it on.
Unless of course the Iworx team wants to write a Windows CP 
j/k Don’t kill me … . .
/me runs and hides.
Really it’s not all that bad of an idea to have a windows version, from the buisness point of view, it’s just another product to offer that would increase marketability of Interworx.
I doubt it would be “easy” in any way shape or form, though. Most likely it would require a whole 2nd development team, as everything would be totally different from linux, as far as interacting with the server. Though Apache2, mysql, perl, ext /are/ available for windows, so all the same basic technology could be put to use. IIS would be a far different story, however, and many people using windows as their web server platform would want to use IIS.
My personal opinion about it is that (if it were my buisness) I would not expend development resources on a windows version until the company was in a good financial position to add another development team, so as not to spread resources too thinly and reduce the quality of the product(s).
Having a complete all in 1 package really would be ideal.
Something with apache, php, mysql, etc all bundled together, distributed as a whole and whatnot.
Not a bad idea. Personally I’d stay away from IIS. 
Tim and nBright thanks for the responses. It’s kind of what I figured and luckly I am not involved in general web hosting. That is just way too hard. Too much overhead and competition. I mean when people are selling something for $5 that you need to charge $10 to make a profit it’s hard.
Good luck with your FP findings and for the Iworx team if this actual comes to be something that might/will work I think it should be something that should be enabled/installed via NodeWorx. That way those of us that don’t have any use for it can avoid it. I just don’t like mixing linux and windows stuff in general.