Asterisk is a powerful telephony platform. However, that power is only as valuable as its ability to be used by a particular target user. There is a lot of value to having graphical interfaces (GUIs) for Asterisk. Most GUIs are specifically designed to support a particular task. For example, some GUIs are designed specifically for voicemail systems. Others are specifically targeted to the hospitality industry. There is some demand to have a GUI that targets Asterisk generally, but there is a natural trade-off between the ease of use and simplicity of a GUI, versus the number of available features. For example, the GUI that a seasoned systems administrator might require would likely be different than that of an office administrator who is only responsible for simple moves, adds, and changes to the system. Given this wide ranging demand, Digium developed a GUI framework called (uncreatively) the Asterisk GUI. Rather than developing a single GUI, Digium developed different GUIs and a framework to trivialize the creation and modification of GUIs for different segments.

A second goal was to make sure that the GUI interacted with Asterisk’s traditional configuration methods in a way that did not preclude someone from using them. Most GUIs for Asterisk use an intermediate configuration format or database, then spit out configs for Asterisk to use. Unfortunately that means that any option that is not presented within the GUI cannot be “manually” set in the configuration files. By contrast, the Asterisk GUI actually modifies your traditional Asterisk configuration files, meaning that your changes in the GUI and your changes to the files themselves can co-exist and even flow back and forth. As an example, if you change the caller ID for a user in users.conf then refresh the GUI, you’ll see the change in the GUI as well. Likewise if you change it in the GUI and reload the file, you’ll see the change in the file. If you add new settings that are not presented in the GUI (for example if you add nat=yes to a particular entry in users.conf, then change the caller ID in the GUI, you’ll see that the nat=yes line will remain in the file even though the caller ID change goes through. Comments are also generally preserved across GUI edits. This means that not only is the GUI no longer required to display all possible configurations, since esoteric ones can be set manually. This also means that when someone starts by using the Asterisk GUI and then outgrows it, there is a natural path for them to be able to start creating more sophisticated functions without abandoning the GUI with which they’re familiar.