I’ve not made any mention of PDNSOps since the original blog post back in October 2011. This isn’t for lack of trying, it’s just that the holidays were a busy time and didn’t allow for a lot of programming time. We have made some progress dealing with a bunch of bugs, and we’ve also figured out our future plans for the project.
I took over leadership of the PDNSAdministrator project because I didn’t want to let the tool die. I dragged
Ben in to help out with the coding of the project. Between the two of us, we started to cut into some of the bugs that had been filed at Google Code. While things weren’t going very fast, there was progress.
Shortly after the beginning of the year, I had a few chats with Ben about the long term viability of the code base. One of the things that I didn’t like was the multitude of different code bases glued together. There was nothing wrong with doing that, but we weren’t familiar with any of them. We started to kick around the idea of a complete re-write, so I drafted up what I titled the PRD (really it’s just a list of features we want).
Not too long after Ben started said ground-up rewrite. We decided on using the Yii Framework since it would give us a solid base to work from. It also has the added bonus of using the PHP PDO class which supports numerous database backend drivers (including MySQL, SQLite, PostgreSQL, MS SQL and DB2). This new codebase is being referred to as PDNSOps2 (or PDNSOps Mark 2).
I’m very pleased to announce that Ben committed the first set of usable code for PDNSOps2 over at GitHub. We’ve even started filing issues for bugs and features we want to see. I’ve set up a few milestones, the first of which is the official beta release I hope to have out by the end of March.
I encourage anyone who wants to be involved to either ping me, or fork & pull request. The entire reason I’ve moved the project to GitHub is to make it easier for non-project members to contribute code. We’ve had a number of bugs filed for PDNSOps Mk1 that included diff file fixes, why not skip the entire bug middle man? Also, for those worried, PDNSOps Mk 1 will not be getting the punt, we’ll continue to bug fix it — but we’ll also be encouraging users to upgrade to Mk 2.