DirectAdmin Wish-list

As I use DirectAdmin more and more, I’ve become very fond of the product and believe it’s well worth the money for it. Like any product, however, I’ve got some wish-list items that would be great if the developers would integrate. Unlike most wish-lists, I’ve spent some time really digging into where these items could be located, and I believe I’ve got some pretty solid feature requests here.

The List

1. SSL by Default on Admin Panel: By default, DirectAdmin doesn’t issue even a self-signed certificate to listen on. This means all communications with the DA admin panel are plaintext unless you setup a certificate yourself following their instructions. As the internet has evolved, and companies have become evermore invasive, it would be nice to see DirectAdmin add twenty seconds to the installer to setup SSL certificates by default, even if self-signed. It’s better than nothing, however, one step further would be if there’s a valid DNS record, issue a LetsEncrypt SSL certificate by default.
2. Exim and Postfix: I’d love to see DirectAdmin support both Exim and Postfix. I personally have more experience with Postfix and seeing DirectAdmin give you the option would be nice. While I understand it’s not a very short-term realistic goal as the amount of work required to configure the stack and maintain it would be a nightmare initially, over the long run if fine-tuned, it could be very effective.
3. Crisp in DirectAdmin: I’m a big fan of live-support plugins like Crisp and use them to communicate with prospective customers. I’d love to see DirectAdmin have a simple method in their Get Support area (ticket system), to inject Live Chat for customers if they need assistance when the support hours are in. I’m aware there are some ways to do it already, but, a page-specific setting would be nice to have. It could be implemented in the Admin Settings on a per-reseller basis for multi-tenant situations, I imagine it would be stored in a database table that’s queried based on da_authenticated_user=’$USER’. This allowing the multi-tenancy support and injection per-page.
4. Better Mobile Admin Interface: Like Plesk has an application, I’d love to see DirectAdmin build a similar application that uses the DirectAdmin API to communicate and manage the server. The APIs are already written in DirectAdmin, so the biggest meat would be the actual application interface. Specifically, I’m looking for usage statistics per-site, basic functions (eg, Click to open webmail, SQL admin) that already exist within DirectAdmin. It would make management on the go easier from a user and administrative perspective. Realistically, a framework such as Iconic or React Native would work beautifully for this, and be extremely flexible. Bonus points if it was open source so us fellow developers could add what we wanted inside of it.

That’s all for my four-point wish list. I’ve kept it short intentionally. If I had to pick my two top priorities, I would say SSL by default (#1) and Mobile Admin Interface (#4) would be the most important as a system administrator standpoint. From a reseller perspective, I’d say live chat (#3) and SSL by default (#1) are the most important.