Pidgin Talk gets its first admin pages and a sign-in.
Until now, changing anything meant editing the database by hand, which is fine for us and unkind to everyone else. Pidgin Talk now has web pages.
What is there
- Sign in.
- Add a provider: host, username, password. The page shows right away whether it connected.
- Add an extension. The system makes the password and shows it to you.
- See, live, which providers and phones are connected.
That last one took the most care. A status that is only right when you refresh the page is a status people stop trusting. The badges update by themselves as things change.
What it looks like
Nobody will mistake it for a design award. It is bare HTML: a heading, three links, a table and a form. But everything on it is true, and it loads before you have let go of the mouse.
No sign-up page
There is no way to create an account from outside. The very first visit to a new system creates the administrator, and that page then disappears for good. After that, people are added by an administrator.
Two kinds of people
There are administrators, who can change the system, and everyone else, who can see only what is theirs. A person can be linked to an extension, which later is what will let them see their own voicemail and nobody else's.
A note on secrets
A phone system has to keep passwords it can read back, because it must use them to sign in to providers and to check phones. Those are encrypted before they are stored, so the database on its own does not give them away.
The passwords people use to sign in to the web page are different: those are stored as one-way hashes and cannot be read back by anyone, us included.