Congratulations! We have now installed Asterisk and configured most of your new open source phone system. Some readers may now be asking, "Are we there yet?". Well, quit whining—it's not far now and we have already come a good way. Let's pause for a moment and review the plan that we created in Chapter 2, Making a Plan for Deployment, where we should have decided what extensions and services we'll provide. Relax, the hard part is behind us, and now we might even start having fun!
In this chapter, we are going to create a full dialplan together. What is a dialplan? Asterisk is a powerful and flexible solution for many different telephony needs. Did you ever wonder how we use all of these features? This is how. At this point, programming experience may well give you an advantage, but it is by no means essential.
When calls come into the switch, we tell Asterisk step-by-step how to handle the call. Steps can be as simple as playing a sound file to running a customized...