I am going to try and start a weekly Saturday morning technical blog about some cool Tip or Trick you can do with FreePBX that most people are not aware of. As anyone who knows me over the years spelling and grammar are not by strong suite so please do not take offense if you find mistakes. I am here to try and provide valuable technical information.

If you have any request for things you would like me to go more indepth on please feel free to comment here and I will see if I can cover it for you in a future blog.

In our never ending quest to make FreePBX the best phone system that doesn't require money to buy (and even better than most that do cost money...), allow us to introduce you to the latest features in the Backup & Restore module. Last week we alluded to a critical server error, but left you guessing as to how we address that. This is a big step in that direction.

In case you missed it, our lead developer Philippe Lindheimer gave a wonderful presentation on FreePBX at Astricon this past Oct. (2009). The presentation gives a very nice overview of FreePBX, its capabilities, and what the future holds. See it here:
http://www.astricon.net/2009/astricon/presentation/FreePBX/index.htm

Previously, we discussed [b]preventing [/b]outbound calls from FreePBX by using two methods: Misc Applications and outbound routes. There is also (at least) two ways to [b]allow [/b]outgoing calls using a whitelist, i.e. allowing calls [b]only [/b]to the numbers specified.

Perhaps one of the most requested features in FreePBX is the ability to configure calling permissions. While this is a complex and costly request from a development point of view, there are some simple techniques which can be used to provide some level of outbound call control. It is said that well written software can be used in a way totally different to what its author intended. Some of the current FreePBX modules can be 'exploited' to provide just such functionality.

One of the really cool things added to the latest version of FreePBX is support for Russell's devstate backport for Asterisk 1.4. Today I decided to have a look at how it works, and I found it to be extremely simple and straightforward to set up. Obviously, you need to add the backport to asterisk. Luckily, that is extremely easy - just follow the directions in the readme.

In part 1, we were discussing the basics of how the Asterisk dialplan works. To recap: asterisk is made up of contexts, which can in turn include more context, creating the whole dialplan. FreePBX takes advantage of this structure by creating a lot of contexts and then included these in each other. Until now, the easiest way to include your own custom dialplan was to put it in one of custom context that FreePBX intentionally leaves blank for the purpose of customization.