My brother’s put together an article on how to build a virtual hosting control panel like plesk or webmin, but in PHP. He’s got a blog entry about it here (where you can comment) and the main article is here.
I've been working with the web since 1994, and with a variety of web technologies since 1996 - PHP, ASP, Perl, CF, Java, Grails and .Net. My main areas of expertise are in PHP and Grails these days.
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Let me take a look.
cPanel and webmin are writen in perl i think.
Webmin is (or was last I checked) and cpanel probably is. Plesk is done in PHP, but it’s 100% encrypted so there’s no ability to make any changes. To their credit they’ve developed some degree of extensibility and ways to register new programs to be run by certain triggers (perhaps cpanel has something like that too?) But having the code to your own control panel, and customizing it to your needs, would be useful to many people as well.
Take a look at SysCP which seems to be completely written in PHP.
I found the following ones in PHP, open source too:
VHCS
baifox
DTC
syscp.org
web-cp.net
The problem is, they don’t appear very “pluggable”. They’re all focused on LAMP, with no ability to swap out webmail clients. Also, one of the points of the article is to help people get a solid foundation for making a repeatable application “stack”. Using ant and subversion at the very beginning of a project helps to eliminate growing pains later on.