"Is there a way to build a frontend for conference rooms (meet-me) so that the user can call in and input the room they want to join, enter a pin, and then be placed in that room or told it is an invalid room?"
That was my original question...how can you have an invalid room if you're creating it automatically? Nowhere did I ask for automatic creation of rooms. I just wanted a frontend to rooms that I already created...I think i said that a few times, hell I even posted an example "rough draft" of what I was looking for!!! I'm sorry I could not convince you guys that what you were suggesting wasnt going to work for "me"..but you werent listening.
And I really dont appreciate the snide remarks about the "big bucks". I dont make big bucks....
Anyway, this is how I ended up doing it, this should work for other people too:
As it turns out, the meetme application does most of the work I was looking for...
edit extensions_custom.conf and add these lines to the end:
[custom-meetme-fe]
exten => s,1,Answer
exten => s,2,Wait(1)
exten => s,3,Playback(conf-placeintoconf)
exten => s,4,Playback(system)
exten => s,5,Wait(1)
exten => s,6,MeetMe(,scM,)
exten => s,n,Hangup
Under Tools add a custom destination and in the description call it Meet-Me Frontend. In the custom destination field put custom-meetme-fe,s,1 and click submit changes
Now under inbound routes (or you can use an IVR and it will be an option to select on the menus also, my calls are coming from a Cisco Call Manager so I use inbound routes for all calls without an IVR) you will have a Custom Applications bullet selection, select it and make sure Meet-Me Frontend is selected in the drop down menu and you are done. submit your changes and reload
Add your conference room using FreePBX just like you normally would, and you should be able to call into your asterisk box and select the conference rooms
that have already been made. Be sure to change the cheesy intro messages I threw together...
The people calling into my asterisk box and going through here have no option of being an admin of the channel, so if thats a problem for you then you will have to do something different. I wanted the admin to ALWAYS be on my internal system so it works fine for me. I watched the call progress on a call made from internal and it does a READ for the pin and then matches against a user or admin and opens the channel accordingly...you could always replicate that if you need that functionality.