Not sure if you have known this, but [sending voicemails to your cellphone] goes along [nicely] with your SMS Alerts for every Asterisk call.

http://www.ctrlaltgeek.com/2009/07/13/asterisk-voicemail-sent-to-cell-phone/

Mihai

first off I will mention that I saw the ticket get closed and immediately reopened it (before ever seeing this comment here which was just pointed out to me). Feel free to read the ticket and my comment.

As far as your comment "…something similar but that was more of a community-developed project, and not the “baby” of (at most) a small handful of people (but primarily one person) who just don’t seem to care about being inclusive, whether it be toward existing users or potential new developers."

I guess all I can say is that you must be smoking something. Go look through the history of FreePBX and it’s SVN. And that doesn’t tell the whole story given the huge number of checkins that I or others have done on behalf of more casual contributors who have provided their contributions in tickets and forum posts. I seem to recall counting recently, if my memory serves me, there were like 2 dozen people who had svn write access and typcially 6 or so active developers at any given point of time these days?

The issues of inconsistencies, low on documentation, etc are the very results of an extremely community driven effort and it’s heritage of how it has grown up very ‘un-disciplined’ (which isn’t a good thing per se but is also what has made it so popular)

As far as v3, it’s being done very hands off. I wish I had WAY more time to spend on it. But at the same time, I am enjoying the fact that there are new developers with new perspectives who are getting involved becasue for all the good things in FreePBX, we don’t also want to go through a rewrite and end up with some of the same baggage that we have today. But anyhow, there will be more information coming shortly on that front, but I can assure you that the work going on is following the legacy of FreePBX, strong community driven development by some great developers!

So in closing, everyone has the right to their opinion, long live Freedom of Speech. But you may want to consider ‘checking your facts’ when writing strong opinions like that.

You say that "Indeed, with calls from outside your PBX, it would be impossible to decipher the destination extension without first answering the call." But that’s not true in the specific case where a DID is associated with a single extension. And in that case, where you are in fact talking about a DID that normally goes direct to an extension, then the "Answer" statement on line 1 would assure that the call gets answered (possibly resulting in a toll charge for some callers) even if the destination extension is busy or never answers.

So either way there’s an issue – if the call (from a DID) goes to an IVR first, then the "Answer" statement doesn’t matter because the IVR has (or will) answer the call, but then you have the issue of whether the party that is supposed to get the call also gets the notification. On the other hand, if a DID is associated with a single extension then, unless I’m totally missing something here, that "Answer" statement guarantees the line will "supervise" whether the extension associated with the DID ever answers or not.

Regrading the Perl code, I thought I had specifically said that you wouldn’t use that when using your PHP code – your PHP code would replace the Perl code in the article I mentioned. Sorry if I didn’t make that clear enough. So, really, I was simply suggesting a different way of calling your code, that would not result in the call being answered (unless that happened in some other part of the call flow) and that would let you send a notification based on extension (or ring group) called.

My comment about the code bypassing internal FreePBX stuff was based on the line that includes "Dial(local/701@from-internal)" – I assumed that 701 was the destination extension (since I see no indication anywhere in the article that it references anything else). Perhaps 701 is some kind of special destination on a PiaF system and you forgot to mention that? But if not, then my comment was simply to reflect the fact that you normally don’t include a "Dial" statement to go directly to an extension in a custom context because it could bypass all sort of things such as checking the status of the extension (with regard to Do Not Disturb and similar features), or whether there’s a follow-me applicable to that extension that should be observed, and things of that nature. Again, I may be missing something here and if so I apologize, but personally I just wouldn’t ever feel comfortable about using a "Dial" statement to go directly to an extension in a FreePBX custom context.

Now having said all that, I saw your FreePBX feature request (that was my first clue that I might have upset you, for which I gain apologize) and I personally thought it was a very valid request and something that many of us have wanted. And it frustrates me no end that the FreePBX developers’ standard answer to everything is that all will be fixed when version 3.0 comes out, when if it were up to me I’d prefer they stop doing any work on a new version and just document the existing one. Frankly I think they are going in the wrong direction and that if they ever do come out with this mythical 3.0, a lot of users are not even going to want it because it will be what one person wants (the leader of the FreePBX development team, who can be kind of an arrogant knucklehead at times) and not something that the users or even many of the would-be developers want. Lord knows they’ve managed to offend enough people who’d like to help develop modules and such for FreePBX, but I probably shouldn’t say any more about that. But anyway, I thought your request was very valid and I wish it hadn’t been just waved off at it was.

I suppose I shouldn’t ask, but have you ever considered using anything other than FreePBX as the GUI in PBX in a Flash? Does anything similar even exist? I’d love to see something similar but that was more of a community-developed project, and not the "baby" of (at most) a small handful of people (but primarily one person) who just don’t seem to care about being inclusive, whether it be toward existing users or potential new developers. I love FreePBX to death for the functionality it provides, but just really don’t like the way they are so dismissive of feature requests, many module contributions and patches, and even some bug reports, and always seem to be on a quest for the magical but elusive version 3.0.

[WM: Not offended at all. I really appreciate your comments and apologize if my response came across as harsh. I also didn’t know my FreePBX request already had been rejected. Sorry to hear that. 🙁

I used to use your Urang II utility until I got a Mac and discovered you don’t have a Mac version – then I switched to using the technique shown on this page:

http://www.freepbx.org/support/documentation/howtos/how-to-set-up-notification-caller-id-popup-on-mac-os-x-linux-and-other-

There’s actually a couple of methods there, but the one I use is the "Alternate Method" shown starting about a third of the way down the page. I believe that method could be easily altered to replace your first step in these instructions. You wouldn’t need the perl script there (though you could still use it if you also want the Growl notifications), instead when you go into etc/asterisk/extensions_custom.conf, in place of (or in addition to) the line

exten => ****525,1,AGI(growlsend.agi,192.168.0.123,GrowlPassWord,525)

You’d use a line of the form
exten => ****525,1,AGI(nv-twitter.php|${CALLERID(name)}|${CALLERID(num)})

Of course you’d have to read the article for this to make sense, but the point is that by doing it using their method you don’t answer the line prior to sending the notification, and you don’t go outside the normal FreePBX call processing to actually complete the call to the extension.

One other thought: Although the Twitter notifications are a nice touch, I’ve found that Twitter is not nearly as reliable as some of the more venerable Instant Messaging applications such as AIM, or Google’s Jabber-based instant messaging. Since there are even AIM clients available for many phones (and since you don’t incur SMS charges when using IM services, and since you aren’t limited to a specific number of characters and could therefore include additional information such as the date and time of the call), I wish there were a method as easy as this to send an AIM message whenever when a call comes in.

One other issue with TweedleD at present is that each copy on nv-twitter.php can only handle calls for a single user, due to the fact that the recipients Twitter ID and/or SMS address are hardcoded into the start of the file. Of course it’s easy to create multiple copies of nv-twitter.php (with slightly different names) to handle multiple users, but that’s not exactly the most elegant way to handle it. I wish this functionality could be placed in a module that would then add appropriate fields to each extension’s setup page (for Twitter ID, SMS address, and possibly AIM account name, etc. if you can possibly finagle that) and then if one or more of those fields are filled in, it would send the appropriate notifications when a call comes in. Still, this is great added functionality as it is, so thanks for your work on this.

[WM: Good suggestions. We’ll have a look. Thanks, Mike.]

There is some nice to have things :

1. Show the trunks name instead of the number that the user was calling into.
2. Support for 24h time.
3. Easy editable text
4. As mentioned Nicholas better way to integrate this into many trunks, i also have many.

/mihai