On May 23, 2013, at 2:00 AM, Matthew Cordes <cordes.matthew@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi,

I'm new to FreeSwitch and starting to experiment with conferences. I've browsed the wiki and I'm half way through the ebook and I'm running into a few questions I'm hoping I might be able to get some help with.

1. How do I translate conference cli commands (e.g. "conference xxx mute yyy") into a dialplan xml actions?

You don't really. Why exactly would you want to do this?

2. The default behavior of the conference is to disable hold music and allow the participants to speak when there are two or more callers. How might I keep the conference on hold until a particular caller joins? Additionally when this special user leaves I'd like to place the conference back on hold.

https://wiki.freeswitch.org/wiki/Mod_conference

3. Where might I find info regarding loading configuration information (particularly the user directory) from an external source (probably a database and probably via mod_python)?

my recommendation : https://wiki.freeswitch.org/wiki/Mod_xml_curl

4. I'd like to have some private conferences that only certain callers can join. I'll know the callers' ids before hand. I'm assuming a reasonable way to handle is with user groups. How would I test if a user is a member of a particular group?

If your doing dialplan via mod_xml_curl you can do all that validation in your dialplan lookup.