RoundCube Webmail 0.1-beta changepassword patch
Sunday, May 21st, 2006When I was deploying the new corporate mailserver I needed to re-install the webmail client. We used to work with SquirrelMail (http://www.squirrelmail.org/), a very decent and extendable webmail client. But we all know that the UI of SquirrelMail is ugly, really ugly.
So after some googling I came across this new great webmail client named RoundCube (http://www.roundcube.net/). This is a new fully featured AJAX-based webmail client with a very slick UI. From the first moment I saw that RoundCube was the way to go.
After I did the installation and played around with the webclient I wanted to extend it and give the ability to my users to change their password. The basic idea was to add a tab ‘Password’ in the settings window. Since I’ve configured my mailserver (postfix) with mysql (user fields are created dynamically) it’s just a matter of updating the correct row in the database and reconnect to the IMAP server (courier-imap).
The only problem is that the framework of RoundCube is creap, and I mean really crap. It took me 6 hours to create the tab and the underlaying forms / code. Not because I work that slow but because it’s not intuitive and you have to mess in 5 files in order to add a new action (Ok, I only worked at night on it so my mind wasn’t that clear but anyway).
Below I’ve attached the patch, so if some of you want to make your own tab you can read through the patch and see how it works.
It uses an external script (ext/change_password_function.inc) with one function in it: change_password_function ($user, $currentpass, $newpass).
In my case, it just updates the postfix mailbox database but you can modify this code to fit your needs (eg. if you use the courierpassd you can connect to the password-daemon and change the user’s password here).
Enjoy it,
Nicolas