Website Control Panel

Some notes about requirements for a website control panel that would be aimed at site/content administrators. Ideally would result in elimination of local account creation, providing web site management in a through-the-web interface

There are two distinct control-panel types or interfaces commonly available and each is aimed at different audiences. The first is more sophisticated and full-featured aimed at admins at ISPs themselves, providing low-level control over many services and systems like DNS, email accounts, generally automating many of the tasks the ISP has to perform to establish a host site for a customer. The second type is aimed at the users/customers themselves and allows them to view their site only and manage their own folders, access permissions, change error pages and view reports etc.

Many of the available control-panels provide interfaces for both levels of control (i.e. admins and users) by challenging users to log in and determining their privilege. The need for this sort of tool (more site management than content) is driven by potential reduction in support load on us (W3T/ITS) to manage current sites by allowing trusted admins to manage some of their own services and parameters, and desire/demand for these distributed features/reporting by clients.

There are plenty of sophisticated web based control panels (see links) and our requirements would be for a more restrictive mechanism than typically offered by ISPs but should be generic enough that's its useful to others.

Many of the features will involve file-system changes, which would be carried out by some proxy user after the web admin has logged in under their own username.

The proxy user might then edit .htaccess files (no direct access should be provided to .htaccess file from user) where the change involves configuring Apache's behaviour.

Typical/Possible Features

Where possible integrate local existing implementations of web admin applications and skin them in the form of the control panel.

Other tools could also be integrated into a kinda admin-portal. e.g. the HTML validator, the metageta.pl script, meta data generation, quicksearch fails, and something like the MyGrater for managing test-live content movement.

Could also allow them to manage the behaviour/style of their include files (e.g. SSI files) to change site look (example), navigation, style (see change_look.jpg)

File/Folder Management

• file uploads/deletes
• file/folder redirects
• directory browse (example)
• create directory (example)
• set permissions: local user/pwd pairs for folders (example)
• set access control
• navigation management

Site Management and Reporting

would be useful to have an i/f where admins can select what they want reported on, when, and who the reports should be sent to, e.g. some of this might be extracted from CSV Analog reports and output from Jamie's log based billing script

• customise error page messages
• customise search page/restrict parameters for HTDig
• log reports (example)
• disk/bandwidth usage
• validation checks
• traffic
• live statistics
• current server stats (uptime/ sw versions / installed tools)

Contact Management

• key owner name/contact (example)
• key owner email
• Feedback Form authoring

User Management

• add FTP user : a virtual upload account

Other Features

Commercial control panel products offer loads of low-level admin features that we are unlikely to ever need for both security reasons and due to the low demand for the functionality by clients. Following are some common control panel features we probably wouldn't provide:

Hosting Settings

Many web control panels allow an admin to control their virtual hosting settings which we'd probably not allow. Typical controls include..

• root folder location
• virtual host setup (example)
• sub-domains and aliases
• domain redirection /DNS/IP details
• Front Page extension management
• email aliases , auto-responders and FWDers
• MIME types
• cron job setup and monitoring
• samba/file-share management
• Apache Handler settings/control

Database Management

its unlikely we'd offer this when there are no dbase admins outside of W3T/ITS and there are dedicated client tools for the purpose (e.g. MySQLCC)

ECommerce/shopping-cart

Mailing Lists / WebMail / Backups

Account/Invoicing

Resources / Links:

Open source control panel projects

• ISPMan
• web://cp (screenshot)
• vqAdmin

Commercial Control Panels (all $1000's)

• cPAnel (screenshot)
• enSim (screenshot)
• Helm (screenshot) - Win2K only
• H-Sphere
• Plesk (screenshot))
• WebMin (more general purpose Unix admin tool)

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See Also: Project Ideas | Notes Index

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