Drupal Asterisk module
A couple weeks ago after I upgraded my home office PBX to Trixbox 2.2.4 I did a search on drupal.org to see if there were any modules for Asterisk. Sure enough I found one that had been ported from drupal 4.6 by Chad Phillips, better known as hunmonk in the drupal community.
If you haven't checked out the module, check out his demo site and get in touch with hunmonk for a live demonstration. He showed me some pretty cool features in the demonstration, but the one that sold me was the call bridge. What happens is:
- You enter a phone number on your drupal web site
- Your drupal site will make an XML-RPC request to your asterisk server which doesn't have to be running drupal.
- Your asterisk server places a call to the phone number you configured for your account on your drupal site.
- Once you answer the call that your asterisk server placed, it will start calling the number that you entered on your drupal site.
- When the other end of the phone call picks up, the call is bridged.
This is a pretty sweet deal if you have Sprint or Nextel and a free incoming plan. Basically you can call anyone without running up your minutes. What even makes this feature even more cool is that the voip provider I use allows me to caller id spoof. I have 5 different phone numbers, and with caller id spoofing I can make all my phone lines look like one phone number. I can be any where in the world and make it appear that I'm calling whoever from my home, or cell, or... you get the idea.
The installation instructions for the module are awesome. Chad really took the time to make sure this module was well documented. I did run into a few issues with my asterisk configuration to work with the drupal module, but I didn't have to modify anything in the drupal module to get it to work. Just a couple things in my dial plan. I'll leave that for another blog post though.