[PacketFence-devel] Upcoming PacketFence v4 release!

[Ludovic M. <lma...@in...>]

Hello everybody,

Over the past few months, we've been working at Inverse on getting 
PacketFence v4 out by the end of this year. Things are progressing very 
well and this message aims to highlight some of the upcoming changes in 
PacketFence.

The most important change in v4 is the brand new Web-based 
administrative interface. We've based everything on Catalyst, Perl 
Template ToolKit and Bootstrap. This results in a much more modern GUI 
which is an order of magnitude faster then the previous one but more 
importantly, it allows us to make PacketFence fully configurable through 
the Web interface while keeping all of the core features of PacketFence 
unchanged.

All "external" modules have been directly included in the new GUI, such 
as the Statement of Health (SoH) module and the guests management module 
(which is now simply called "users management"). The following 
screenshots show these integrated modules:




One the biggest change in the new Web interface is the addition of the 
authentication sources module. This module allows you to add Active 
Directory/LDAP/Kerberos/RADIUS/htpasswd and local authentication sources 
and create rules. Rules are composed of conditions and actions. This 
gives a lot of flexibility to PacketFence, which will compute rules 
on-the-fly and apply actions (set a role/category, set an unreg date, 
mark the user as a sponsor, set the access level of the user for the Web 
administrative interface, etc.) when conditions are met.The following 
screenshots show this new module:





Of course, everything else has been overhauled, as we want the new 
interface to be much more intuitive. Here are some other screenshots:






If you're interested in following closely our development, please have a 
look at the "catalyst-admin" 
(https://github.com/inverse-inc/packetfence/tree/feature/catalyst-admin) 
branch on Github. We'll soon start releasing nightly builds of v4, in 
preparation for the first final release.

As usual, your comments are welcome!

Best regards,

-- 
Ludovic Marcotte
+1.514.755.3630  ::  www.inverse.ca
Inverse inc. :: Leaders behind SOGo (www.sogo.nu) and PacketFence (www.packetfence.org)