Re: developing with php

[Joe C. <jo...@sw...>]

Got three years to spare?  ;-)  (Webmin has been under serious 
development for at least that long...)

To answer your question more seriously:

If you have to ask these kinds of questions, you're not going to have 
the skills needed to reinvent even a small part of Webmin for some time 
to come, regardless of the language used.  A serious PHP /and/ Perl 
hacker with some C skills could probably come up with appropriate glue 
to allow you to write integrated Webmin modules in PHP given enough time 
and inclination.

I'm pretty sure the easier path is simply to learn perl well enough to 
write your module(s) in the language that Webmin currently uses.  You'll 
find Perl to be not much different than PHP, when it comes down to the 
actual gritty bits that do all the work--some things will be easier, 
while other things will be harder.  Depending on your programming 
experience, and enthusiasm, you could potentially be writing reasonably 
good module code in under a month (that's about how long it took me to 
start writing real useful modules--nothing like Jamie's best modules, 
but not entirely ugly, either).

That said, if you really, /really/ must go about it this way, you have a 
couple of choices:

Setup Webmin to run under Apache.  This will allow you to run PHP 
programs alongside Webmin.  You'll then need to teach your PHP modules 
how to deal with ACLs from Webmin, and will also have to have all of the 
normal Webmin files (config.info, module.info, etc.).  This isn't really 
writing a Webmin module in PHP, but it will look roughly like a Webmin 
module, and depending on how clever you are with PHP you can probably 
make it act extremely similar to a Webmin module.

Start with some other similar project that is already written in PHP. 
There are a few out there, I'm sure.  Everybody and his brother who has 
learned a few lines of PHP has had the same thought: "This is easy!  I 
could write a cool program to do ________."  A few of them have probably 
even gotten some working code out there.  So look for something that 
addresses some or all of your needs, and build from there.  You won't 
find anything even approaching Webmin's functionality, but maybe you 
don't need all of the functionality of Webmin for your project.

In all cases, beware of security issues...It is real easy to build 
something that will allow any random user to own your server.

Yohanes Adi Gunawan wrote:
> i'm a newbie and i'm trying to create a site that can function like webmin 
> only i'm going to use php?
> is it possible to create something simillar to webmin from php?
> if it is then can anyone give me any hint how can I call webmin's function 
> from php?
> or do i have to create my own modules under php?

-- 
Joe Cooper <jo...@sw...>
Web caching appliances and support.
http://www.swelltech.com