The Road to FreePBX 13

Blog News
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Two weeks ago we pushed FreePBX 12 stable to great reviews and our team is already back to work on FreePBX 13 (and also fixing any outstanding issues in 12 so make sure you report them). It has been a busy week loaded with various caffeinated products and TimTams provided by our favorite Australian coder, Rob Thomas.

Last week we laid the groundwork for the upcoming release of 13 and in the next few months we will work on implementing it. The next version of FreePBX will be responsive which means it will be mobile and tablet friendly. We are adding search functionality to the administration interface that can also work as a quick action box to get you to any module quickly or to find specific destinations like extensions or conferences. We have also cleaned up the interface moving more into using Bootstrap from Twitter as a replacement for the heavy usage of jqueryUI in previous versions. What does this mean for you? It means the site will load quicker, it will be snappier and more responsive as it uses more CSS than the typical javascript that has been used in years past.

Another goal of this release is consistency. We are working to make the module interface components uniform and touch screen friendly throughout all of FreePBX. This means that the look and feel of extensions should work the same as it does in conferences.
In addition to the front end changes we are also doing some much needed backend work. We are re-building the FreePBX installer to be cleaner and more efficient. Our team will be moving the last few items written in Bash to PHP using the Symfony Console framework. This will allow uniform coding standards and eliminate some of the issues that come from mixing coding languages.
FreePBX 13 will deprecate “amportal” and introduce fwconsole. The new fwconsole is a pure PHP modular command line utility for managing some of the nuts and bolts of FreePBX. The new fwconsole is modular, hookable and integrated. The fwconsole utility will retain all the functionality of amportal and it allows expandability in the future from any module.
Here are some early screenshots of the progress so far, this is still a work in progress:




  • With FreePBX 12 we are deprecating support for Asterisk 1.8 and 10.
  • Asterisk 1.8 and 10 will not be supported in FreePBX 13.
  • FreePBX 13 will support Asterisk 11, 12 and 13.
  • The amportal command will still be in 13 but will alias functionality over to fwconsole.
  • The amportal command will be removed from FreePBX 14

We are still in the early stages of this release build so other features may spring up and the images above may not look the same as the final release. We will release more information on these updates and features as they become available.

Thank You for using FreePBX!

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Sweet! Bootstrap ftw!

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Yep. Bootstrap is all @tm1000’s fault. He went ‘Let’s be responsive and mobile friendly’. I was all like ‘No. Let’s hardcode everything for IE6’. Then he beat me, severely, until I came to my senses.

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if fwconsole is going to be the new amportal, somebody should update the wiki here:

http://wiki.freepbx.org/display/L1/amportal+commands

I, for one, would like to know what the fwconsole options will be… Same as amportal?

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There is no need to update that at the current moment that will only confusing people more than they are already getting confusing. Everything in its turn.

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I would love to see some wizards or guided setups added for the more novice users who are just starting with FreePBX.

Just to help them get the unit operational.

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We are working on that as well

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Is it possible to use the new FreePBX 13 full support for UTF-8 MySQL (or MariaDB)?
The database MySQL (or MariaDB) (base asteriskcdrdb and asterisk) use the encoding utf8_general_ci instead latin1_swedish_ci ?
MySQL(MariaDB) server to translate the default UTF-8 encoding
/etc/my.cnf
collation_server=utf8_general_ci
character_set_server=utf8
default-character-set=utf8
init_connect='SET collation_connection = utf8_general_ci’
init_connect=‘SET NAMES utf8’

It is important to fully support multi-language (eg Russian, Chinese).

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The plan is to go to UTF-8 for new installs. Migration can be problematic. One of our key goals over the last year with our partner in Japan is to beef up localization. So this is definitely on our list.

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Thank you very much forward to UTF-8;)

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I moved 3 posts to a new topic: Upgrading Asterisk

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I am more than excited to test the beta of freepbx 13. The realtime search screen shot I see will be my most used function in Freepbx 13. I love these guys. There is no limit to what they can do. Please continue with the good work and “Let’s Freedom Ring”

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