FreePBX on Callweaver

Just wondering if anyone has successfully installed FreePBX on Callweaver yet. What problems and incompatibilites did they have if it’s been done.

And when is FreePBX planned to support Callweaver out of the box, from the looks of the Callweaver website it is near it’s official release.

I have no knowledge of FreePBX running on callweaver yet. FreePBX has the ability to add a new engine like callweaver but there has yet to be any work in doing all the changes that might be necessary to make that happen. If there is someone who wants to take this on including all the changes that might be needed, the FreePBX team would be very happy to provide the support necessary to help them get started and try to get something going.

Philippe Lindheimer - FreePBX Project Lead
http//freepbx.org - IRC #freepbx

From what I understand Callweaver and Asterisk 1.2 are pretty much compatible in regards to dial plans, and configuration files. Hopefully this means any changes to FreePBX shouldn’t be major except for changes to some commands in the dial plans.

I don’t have a huge amount of experience in particular with PHP, but if the changes to get Callweaver working aren’t major it may be something I could start looking at if some guys here are able to point me in the right direction.

I suspect there will be three aspects to getting it working. The ‘static’ part of the dialplan and config files such as extensions.conf needs to be examined and tested. Then there is the code generation. This is done in a layer of FreePBX mostly triggered by the orange reload bar. That part of the code is designed to determine what ‘engine’ is running (e.g. Asterisk, Callweaver, etc.) and then creates all the dialplan. It uses a class to abstract the generation although for the most part there is a one to one mapping of the abstracted commands and the Asterisk commands that are generated. These are all defined in extensions.class.php. So in theory, since callweaver is so close to Asterisk, you could modify that class to reflect and subtle differences (I seem to recall they had a slightly different name for the AGI() command for example). Once you did these two parts you could hope that it would work. But may need to address the third part which is the interaction of the AGI scripts that FreePBX depends on, making sure that they are functioning properly through both the AGI and Asterisk Manager interface.

In theory the port is straight forward. In practice, it has never been done and there are likely to be challenges. The best candidate to do it would be either one of the Callweaver team or if not, someone with a very good understanding of Asterisk and Callweaver including any differences, and then a comfort level with programming at the ‘php’ level. We are very willing to provide support and guidance from a FreePBX perspective to someone who wants to go down this path. It would clearly provide tremendous benefit to the Callweaver project for them to invest in doing this.

Philippe Lindheimer - FreePBX Project Lead
http//freepbx.org - IRC #freepbx

And it went OK… there are lots and lots of stuff that aren’t working properly but I can acctually do some things with it… setting up SIP-trunk and extensions work like a charm… I just follwed that guide on setting up freepbx and asterisk on Ubuntu and well… the rest is history. I recon it will take at least 1-2 weeks more for me to port the install_amp-script and the stuff surronding the whole installation. I’m not really that good at programming but hacking someone elses code usually works good for me…