Usability

Webmin and Usermin could always use some more usability testing and polishing.

UI and Themes

Take advantage of the new mobile device switching feature to offer iPhone style UI using Joe Hewitt's awesome iUI library.

Possibly enhance mobile UI detection using WURFL, so that it is no longer just a boolean switch--so, images could be enabled for devices that support them, light javascript could be used for devices that support it, and full-browser devices like the iPhone and those using Opera Mobile could get a full-featured, but smaller screen formatted version.

Port some of the cooler features from the Virtualmin themes (particularly the new AJAX theme) for use in Webmin. The new system desktop in the Virtualmin theme would be very nice in both Webmin and Usermin, and very easy to bring over, once the Desktop modules are componentized...new widgets will also be very easy to add.

Cluster

Some modules would be well-served by additional cluster capabilities. Apache, for example, could configure matching VirtualHosts? across many machines (correctly configuring the IPs and paths and such, appropriate to the machine, across platforms).

Monitoring and Analytics

Addition of compressed data storage from System and Server Status monitors for use in graphing. Graphing tools could be ported from Virtualmin trivially--we just need the data. Storage in an RRDTool style database (probably without needing RRDTool itself to generate it or read it, since we won't need the graphs) would be ideal so that long-term disk usage can be predicated accurately.

Webmin REPL

An interactive command line shell hooked into the Webmin API. Obviously, extending one of the existing Perl shells is the only sane path here--we'd just need an additional layer to pull in the Webmin::API module and hook up the various modules automatically, so that apache::some_function() would be available immediately upon startup. It'd be nice for development at the very least--but I suspect it would be useful for other tasks, as well, like bulk management jobs.

The API needs to become more discoverable for this to be fun to use, however--we'll want to convert over to inline pod documentation, so that the auto-completion and doc browser found in the best perl shells will Just Work.

A good article about REPLs for Perl, including building one roughly from scratch, is here:

http://chainsawblues.vox.com/library/post/a-perl-read-excute-print-loop-repl.html

Profiles, which seem particularly well-suited to our task, are discussed in this post:

http://chainsawblues.vox.com/library/post/develrepl-part-4---script-options-rc-files-profiles-and-packaging.html

-- SwellJoe - 11 Mar 2008

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