FreePBX v3 - Come Help Us Shape the Future

We are super excited to announce immediate availability of the FreePBX v3 Developers Preview and invite you to get involved to help make this the best PBX application ever! We’ve taken FreePBX's 5 years of experience plus tons of user feedback, and merged this with the TCAPI project (announced last year at ClueCon) and drawn on some great contributions from the Bandwidth.com Phonebooth Project to create a great foundation for the next generation of FreePBX!

FreePBX made its debut in October, 2004 as the AMP project (Asterisk Management Portal) but quickly changed its name to FreePBX in anticipation of new telephony engines coming down the pipe. At that time we adopted a new modular design which resulted in its proliferation and wide community contributions that continue to be strong today. FreePBX has a lot to be proud of as it has become the defacto PBX interface in this space with millions of downloads and an installed base counted in the hundreds of thousands!

Because of the organic nature of its very rapid community driven growth, FreePBX has developed into a very complex project making it challenging for new developers to get involved. We are really happy to announce the great efforts that have gone into creating a very developer friendly foundation for this new release. We approached the changes in v3 with some of the following very important goals:

  • Make FreePBX truly telephony engine independent
  • A well thought out modular design building on the past 5 years of experience
  • Use of a true MVC framework
  • Choose best in breed components and build on top of them
  • Excellent documentation to encourage developer involvement
  • Easily Skinnable

After months of heavy evaluations, we are making available a developer platform to encourage wide participation to build this into the best platform ever! The initial release includes a FreeSWITCH dialplan generator with FreePBX thanks to the great expertise brought on with the TCAPI project! We are super excited to see the development of other dialplan generators soon and with such a great development community available, Asterisk work is already under way and we hope others will be on board quickly!

In addition to merging of FreePBX, TCAPI and Phonebooth, we have picked Kohana, Doctrine and jQuery as core components to realize our design goals. Kohana is an MVC framework that the project has been tracking for a couple of years as one of the core FreePBX developers was very involved with its original development and made sure it evolved with the requirements critical for a future FreePBX version. Doctrine is a superbly capable ORM layer that provides significant advantages over the native offerings in Kohana, and has replaced Kohana's native ORM using facilities in Kohana designed for this purpose. The jQuery JavaScript library is already used in FreePBX today and has widespread adoption across the industry.

You can find LOTS of great documentation and examples on the project wiki as well as a fully functioning ISO for download coming soon to get you started evaluating and contributing to this great project!

We are super optimistic that our efforts to make this project easily accessible to developers will assure its rapid evolution and we look forward to meeting you on the IRC (#freepbx-dev) and Forums. In the meantime, FreePBX 2.x has a 5 year head start so it's still going to take some time for this new version to catch up with comparable features and stability. Therefore, we are simultaneously announcing the formal beta of FreePBX 2.6 to be released by the end of this week (and has been available from SVN for quite some time). This will assure the current FreePBX v2 installed base is strongly supported while v3 quickly evolves.

We are super excited to be bringing so much great stuff to this fantastic world of Open Source Telecommunications which continues to disrupt the whole industry; we are looking forward that these new developments will further intensify that!

For questions about v3, see the FAQ.

Philippe - on behalf of the FreePBX team!

I post a movie of the new ISO install process at http://www.thevoipexperience.net/

Ruben writes a great objective blog post on this subject:

FreePBX growing up is good for you

I think I’ve got the 2.6 beta tarball done, if you want to try testing it early you can pull it down here:

http://mirror.freepbx.org/freepbx-2.6.0beta1.tar.gz

I’ll announce it more properly once I get back from traveling later this weekend and have a chance to check it on some test machines. A few have tested it so far, so it’s probably ok.

I’ll also list out a highlight of the changes. As mentioned, we are super excited about v3 and are getting a lot of interested developers poking around (and some bug fixes and other contributions already flowing). However, v2 + Asterisk is today’s work horse and support and progress on v2 will continue for quite some time to come, this 2.6 release being the next step for v2!

Remember to CTL+SHIFT+Refresh or Module Admin may look a little funky, there are some new CSS style sheet changes.

I have a FreePBX 2.5.1
I want to upgrade to 2.6 on a new box…
Can I do a clean installation and configure using a backup of the FreePBX 2.5.1 ?

I would think that would be just fine. I did some 2.5 to 2.6 testing and just upgrading in place seemed to work fine.

floatinggeese:

If you go that route, do your restore of the 2.5 on top of a 2.5 base, before you install the 2.6 tarball.

If you install the tarball first, then restore from a 2.5 backup, you will completely ‘hose’ your system.

THanks,
Point taken…
I am really looking forward to version 3
It looks like a total show stopper !
Time for me to donate I think…
I’m using the PBX in A Flash Tarball, all should be OK should it not ?

PIAF is fine for 2.6.

There were some cosmetic glitches form some missing CSS changes that I forgot to check-in. I’ve re-rolled the tarball one more time.

If you’ve been looking at the early release of 2.6 to help vet it before putting it out for a wider audience, please have a look at the last one.

Same URL as above:

http://mirror.freepbx.org/freepbx-2.6.0beta1.tar.gz

Thanks!

Kaliniv,

How about starting up your request in a forum thread, it really has nothing to do with the topic of the blog and it’s nice to try to keep the comment threads on topic.

Do I understand correct that you plan to integrate to FreePBX - FreeSWITCH and this way to interconect Asterisk with Skype and other networks?

Digium started selling the software to conect Asterisk with Skype. They had worked together (Skype and Digium) on this and claim that is the best solution.

What do you think about interconnecting Asterisk and Skype?

Hi p_lindheimer,

Sorry I just don’t know where it is and how to write there. Can you please give me link I will write it there. Thanks for the understanding.

http://www.freepbx.org/forums/viewtopic.php