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Project history

Poweradmin has been developed as an open source web interface for PowerDNS for more than two decades. This page gives a short overview of how the project got to where it is today.

Origins

Poweradmin was started by Rejo Zenger. The poweradmin.org domain was registered in 2002, and for many years the project website, the Trac issue tracker, the Subversion repository and the mailing lists were hosted by him. The oldest history in today's repository is the Subversion import from April 2007, followed by the 1.3 and 1.4 work and the 2.0.0 release in 2008.

The 2.1.x releases (2008-2014)

The 2.1 series was developed over several years by a small group of volunteers, with Scott Harvanek acting as co-maintainer and release manager for part of that time.

  • 2.1.5 was released in December 2010. It introduced linked zone templates, which required the template tables to use InnoDB so that changes could be applied in transactions.
  • 2.1.6 followed in 2012. Its main changes were automatic PTR record creation for A and AAAA records, a PDO-based database layer replacing PEAR MDB2, bulk zone registration, salted password hashes, experimental SQLite and Oracle support, syslog logging of authentication events, new Chinese, Czech and Turkish translations, and XSS protection.
  • 2.1.7 was released in 2014 and added a DNSSEC key management page.

Move to GitHub (2011)

In 2011 the project infrastructure was gradually moved away from a single server. Development moved from Subversion and Trac to Git and GitHub, the full Subversion history was imported, and the mailing list moved to Google Groups. Issues have been tracked on GitHub since then.

Change of maintainer (2011)

In late 2011 Edmondas Girkantas, who had been a committer and the main active developer, took over as project lead, with the agreement of the previous maintainers. He has maintained the project since.

Later milestones

  • 2022: development picked up again with 2.1.8, 2.1.9 and 2.2.0, followed by 3.0.0 later the same year.
  • 2023-2025: the 3.x series continued, and 3.9 became the long-term support line.
  • 2025: 4.0.0, including the public REST API.
  • 2026: the 4.x series continued with regular feature releases.

See What's New for details of recent releases.

Thanks

Many people have contributed code, testing, translations and infrastructure over the years. From the early years, thanks go in particular to Rejo Zenger, Scott Harvanek, Peter Beernink, Fabian Dammekens, Antonio Nati and Okky Octaviano, and to everyone who reported bugs, sent patches and helped other users on the mailing lists.