Any chance of moving to Asterisk Realtime Architecture?

what goal are you trying to accomplish? There are a lot of downsides to realtime

As I've added more pages and features in the user portal, it just seems so much easier to work with MySQL. Even though it took a bit of effort to move to ARA for voicemail without killing any Thirdlane features, its worth the effort in the long run in my opinion. Instead of giving the user say, 6 options to set in the user portal via edit_user_vm.cgi, I replaced that page with my own which allows for 2 dozen options. It was easier to use MySQL for all of it. Now I hope I'm never confused for a real programmer so what I'm saying may be totally nuts to someone who knows what they are doing. Ultimately I simply want to expand on Thirdlane's flexibility and write my own features and build on an already great product. Eric, what do you see as major downsides to ARA?

Regards;

FSD

using realtime would erradicate the users ability to use user_extensions.include or do any custom programming.

using realitme is much more difficult to debug dialplan code and mistakes written to the database have costly effects before they have a chance of review. One syntax error you might have caught before even saving the file is now live as soon as you commit the row. This has resulted in complete loss of service in the past. Since all your configuration is entirely in MySQL code review and contribution would come to a halt.

using realtime would all but eliminate the module-only product of thirdlane since now they are forced to have to install mysql and import several tables to support realtime.

theres more but thats all for now.