Not very quick on listing the donations.

I would hope I am not the only one who has joined at Platinum level (pledged two $300 commitments already paid one).

With the number of people that use and request support is very high the interest in pledging funds seems low.

You wondering why attitudes develop when users demand features and don't attempt to understand and read documentation before requesting support. This lack of financial support is exactly the reason.

Mention money and you guys run like cockroaches in a light.

If just a few of us have to pay for it then the whole community suffers.

Yeah, I jumped the gun a bit, however when the Ken first posted to get a feel for who was using it the response was quick.

I know money is tight and not many folks actually make money with their Open Source telephony ventures but even $50.00 goes a long way.

I'll pledge $200 out of my pocket for this project. And by purchasing from my store below, I'll increase that amount!

If you're interested, go to my store below...when checking out, use the coupon code "Custom" without the quotes and you'll get an extra 10% off of your order and in addition I'll add $10 to this project for each order using that coupon code above my $200 pledged.

kenn10, I'll make payment Monday 5/3 for the total accumulated.

http://www.bullzeyenetworks.biz

Check us out for a full line of OpenVox analog and digital cards for your Asterisk systems!!!

I have to admit I haven't donated BUT that is because.

1: I don't use the module.
2: Work uses Asterisk/FreePBX (and I have tried to get them to donate).

We switched to asterisk now about a year ago and in about 3 months we will have reached the payoff for having switched away from our proprietary rented PBX system. Unfortunately getting the company to donate money for anything tech related (the company actually gives very generously to the community we are in), is pulling teeth.

So much so that I have long come to the conclusion the only way we can support open source is through support contracts. On our PBX we currently have a support contract from the vendor who sold the physical system and installed it. I am not sure when he will say all future support is going to cost us (as I say we are hitting the year mark) and at that point I will probably explore instead giving to FreePBX (the question is will they provide a complete support package (including the distro we are running, DAHDI issues etc).

I would suggest that possibly it would be worth it to have support contracts that can optionally include some bucket of funds that is used for future development etc, that the customer can apply when they need. I could include this in support but not do it separately due to the corporate environment...

Unfortunately, no one took advantage of the great deal I was offering. I added my $200 Paypal payment this morning.

I have decided to run this offer to through the entire month of May to help get this important project funded!

If you're interested, please check out my store at www.bullzeyenetworks.biz

Check us out for a full line of OpenVox analog and digital cards for your Asterisk systems!!!

Philippe,

Is there any way we could put together a list on the website of system dealers that actively support FreePBX. Either by donating money or time (for example Scmoozecom donates tons of time which should be enough, although they donate money as well...).

This way when purchasing we could attempt to purchase a system from those people who give back to the community.

If you want to send the contribution directly, it should be sent to paypal @ freepbx.org, or you can just wait until you get a chance to be in front of a computer.

We donated $200 but I feel bad that the project is only funded by a few.

How about only providing the "fixed" custom context module only to people that contributed to the project? That would get donations up quickly as there must be hundreds of users of this module. Make it a paid module and ask users to pay for the upgrade. That will solve the funding issue forever.

Thanks to all the very generous donations I see you have hit your goal! $4,000 has now been raised!

I did want to comment in response to the hole open source discussion. That while I certainly appreciate the frustration (and I didn't donate on this simply because I don't use the module and the company is at the best of times not into donating to these types of causes (a "charity" they'll give to and do very generously but to appreciate that open source isn't necessarily really giving they don't appreciate).

However the power of open source is you guys just got together $4,000 to hopefully get the Custom-Contexts module back up to par. While many people might reap the benefit of that without having contributed they might well be contributing to other open source projects (asterisks or non-asterisk related). For example through a service contract my company does support Vyatta (an open-source router project).

Great going Kenn and all the donators!

I am sorry I have been out of this... As I have mentioned before to those involved, I simply haven't had time. I understand it may be rude of me to do the work now.

That said, I mistakenly pulled up this link http://geekhut.org/2010/02/freepbx-custom-context-module-delegating-outb... on the first page of a Google search yesterday, and got the impression from there that it was worth the effort to make time, if people are still finding it that useful.

It took me longer to get a virtual machine set up and install FreePBX 2.8 than to fix the module to bring it up to date. I understand that there was a bounty collected, that I passed on the offer, and that someone else apparently is already working on a rewrite. I don't mean to step on anyone's toes (or collect someone else's bounty), and I am sure that the rewrite (for $4000!!) will likely be far superior to the original module. This was partly to patch it for the interim just to fix what was broken (I didn't even integrate into the TimeGroups module even though that was the purpose of the TimeGroups module originally), and partly because I guess I bumped into one too many people upset that it will soon be gone.

For now, I updated the source at contributed_modules/modules/customcontexts/ (r9817) and I will let phillipe package a new release if he approves.

naftali5

P.S. I should have made the time a long time ago to look at it. I was told that outbound routing was changed quite drastically, which would break my module, but little did I figure that it actually was changed to remove a serious flaw in design which had cost me dozens of extra lines of code originally. Most of the change was deleting now obsolete code!

Just a quick note (and sorry for the delay, I just got off a plane...)

I've had Moshe working on the changes and he has been doing such for a couple weeks. I was glad to be able to convince Moshe to do the work as opposed to some random developer somewhere that does nothing otherwise for the FreePBX community. (For those who don't know, Moshe has donated hundreds of hours (if not thousands) to FreePBX over the last few years and continues to do such now). Moshe was my second choice after Naftali who, as he pointed out above, I had contacted when all of this kicked off but had no time to work on custom context, for pay or free.

Moshe started doing the work a couple weeks ago. He reverted the changes that naftali checked in in preparation for getting the changes he has been working on into the system. I'm guessing that sundown of the Sabath beat him to getting his changes in or they would have been there by now. They should be in later this weekend.

The changes that Moshe has been working on not only include some similar work that Naftali did, but they also include all of the migration code to take you from 2.7 to 2.8, they include some additional work that makes sure the default context sequencing for some of the selections are consistent with the intended default when no priorities are specified (which was not there in the recent check-ins), there are some functions not present in custom context that are being added to help it interact properly with some aspects of the framework. Moshe is also on the hook to follow-up with once this gets out to beta and production making sure that everything works properly and there is quick turn around as issues are identified. There is also work on the module infrastructure. Unlike the 'core' modules, the Extended Repository, on the server side, is currently not designed to have different module versions for different FreePBX versions. Since we did not want to break 'pre-2.8' systems with the new fixes, this has to also be addressed.

So ... you should be seeing this work hitting the system for testing within the next few days, hopefully sooner.

A couple days ago I pulled the trigger to go to 2.8. Everything seemed to be working fine, until a remote office of ours called to tell me they can't make any outbound calls. Since I know the people who installed our PBX created a custom context manually for that office, I immediately suspected I knew where to look. I decided to remove all the hard work they had done setting things up manually and instead installed the new custom_contexts module. I recreated the custom context needed and all was well. But on the way I found a couple minor bugs.

I found a couple bugs, or perhaps to be more accurate buglets (actually I would call 1 a bug, and 1 a buglet).

The first buglet, is that ALL OUTBOUND ROUTES is given a priority of 96 which is great. However if you disable that and are selecting specific outbound routes they start at a priority of 50 which is low than most other things including internal extensions. The end result is that internal extensions break. This isn't really a bug but it seems to me those should be starting at something like 100 say.

The bug, is that if you change the Context of a custom context (not the description), than go and look a the extensions anything that had that context selected is now blank. Presumably if I can change the name, then the name change should carry through everything else (just like if I change the alias).

I believe a bug was entered the other day on this.

There is an open question on the ticket system wrt to the priorities. If the behavior is something that worked priornto 2.8 and now has issues then it is a bug and should be fixed as part of the work done. Someone with a pre 2.8 system needs to provide feedback on that ticket.

Concerning the context name change, that behavior remains the same as previously and would be a bit of a hack to try and address.

I think there is a bug when the dial patterns are formatted as
20127[4-678-9]XXXX as we get the following error with custom contexts

[2010-10-05 13:25:05] WARNING[4174] ast_expr2.fl: ast_yyerror(): syntax error: syntax error, unexpected $end, expecting ',' or ')'; Input:
0 = 1]?Set(TARGET_FLP42=0998715141234567
^
[2010-10-05 13:25:05] WARNING[4174] ast_expr2.fl: If you have questions, please refer to doc/tex/channelvariables.tex.
[2010-10-05 13:25:05] WARNING[4174] app_exec.c: Deprecated syntax found. Please upgrade to using ExecIf(?(null)((null)))
[2010-10-05 13:25:05] WARNING[4174] pbx.c: Error in extension logic (missing ']')
[2010-10-05 13:25:05] WARNING[4174] ast_expr2.fl: ast_yyerror(): syntax error: syntax error, unexpected $end, expecting ',' or ')'; Input:
0 = 1]?Set(TARGET_FLP42=0998715141234567
^
[2010-10-05 13:25:05] WARNING[4174] ast_expr2.fl: If you have questions, please refer to doc/tex/channelvariables.tex.
[2010-10-05 13:25:19] WARNING[17769] chan_sip.c: Maximum retries exceeded on transmission MTQ2MWU3N2RmMDg0ODJjMDIxMTE4ZWU0MDE2MWZhMzQ. for seqno 2 (Critical Response) -- See doc/sip-retransmit.txt.
[2010-10-05 13:25:19] WARNING[17769] chan_sip.c: Hanging up call MTQ2MWU3N2RmMDg0ODJjMDIxMTE4ZWU0MDE2MWZhMzQ. - no reply to our critical packet (see doc/sip-retransmit.txt).

Thanks for the comments. We'll look into that. I uninstalled custom contexts and the errors are still there so I was wrong there. I think we may have copied some settings over from trixbox during the migration which are causing the errors. I'll post a seperate messg in the forum once we know more.

turns out you need to assign priority 50 to ext-local which is not done by default. While not a real bug I consider this a problem since no documentation exists for the module.

ok,

giving it a test shot I see what you are saying, it does by default make for a bit of a mess when you simply create a brand new context setting everything to allow at first.

For those of you who used this prior to the port from 2.7 to 2.8, is this how it always acted or was it previously a bit better behaved? In other words, on earlier releases, if you were to create a new custom context, and did nothing more then choose allow all, did you end up with your outbound routes all at the end or were they all intermixed like it does now since it starts the priority numbering at 50 for each section?

I use the previous version of custom contexts for 3 separate small firms in our building (company A, B & C), all works well, except for 1 issue. All 3 firms use the directory for calls to search by name, and if they don't know who they are looking for and hit '0', it dumps them to company A's operator extension, even if they were in company B or C's directory. Does this version fix that (or have I been using it wrong all along)?

Thanks.