Confused about purpose of ISPConfig

I'm a little confused about whether ISPConfig is what I need.

What I want to be able to do is:
1. Set up sites for multiple clients - the sites need to be accessible through their domain names i.e. www.mysite.blah.
2. Give them FTP access to update their sites
3. WebMail
4. Allow them to change their passwords
5. Web stats

ISPConfig appears to do all this, but after 2 days of wrestling with it I can't get it configured in an acceptable way.

What I have done:

1. Installed ISPConfig 2.2.3
2. Set up a new client
- I can log on to the ISPConfig admin console as Customer1
3. Created a site for Customer1
- I can access the web site using www.mysite.blah (using a hosts file to do the name -> ip for testing purposes)
4. I created a user under the site (web1_user)
- I can access this users web site through www.mysite.blah/~web1_user

So, I now have 2 web sites, but I only wanted one.
The web sites are served out of:
/home/www/web1/web
/home/www/web1/user/web1_user/web

I can log on to ISPConfig as Customer1 and use webftp (logging in again as web1_user) to update the main web site.
I cannot use an FTP client to log in as Customer1.
I can use an FTP client to log in as web1_user but that put me in the web1_user/web directory so I can only update the users home website, not the main one.

I cannot log on to the ISPConfig control panel as web1_user, but, I assume if I installed the web mail software I'd be able to log in there as web1_user and change the password from there?

I cannot figure out how to serve out the users website from a domain. Forwarding is not a solution because I want to serve it from www.mysite2.blah/index.html NOT www.mysite.blah/~web1_user/index.html.

The co-domain stuff just seems to define aliases for the existing virtual server.

I must be misunderstanding how ISPConfig is intended to be used, or have misunderstood how to configure it.

To summarise, I just want a 5 min guide to how to set up a website for a user with their own domain, with quotas, ftp access, webmail, webstats. If you can help me understand how to do this, I'll have a crack at writing this 5 minute guide.

(I'm using proftpd, fedora core 5, postfix).

Thanks.

 

Thanks for that, I can get that working. I assume then that I can't prevent the creation of the user site? i.e for the use-case where I just want to give one person one site I have to create the customer and then the user (resulting in the main site and the user site), and then instruct the user to only upload to the main site and to ignore the user directory...

 

By default every user has a web, in which they can upload data.
This can be very nice for FTP-purposes or when you want to switch over very fast to another website.
(The uploaded site of the user market as administrator, is visible from the Internet).

If you don't want webs for all the users, you have to modifiy the ISPConfig-database within PHPmyAdmin.

I would not do that if i was you.
By informing the users about the procedure, you can avoid mistakes.