WHMCS V5.1 Improvements Preview

[Matt]

WHMCS V5.1 Improvements Preview

 

Where does the time go?!? I had originally planned to post this blog last week, but it seemed like no sooner had the week started than it was already the end of the week again! However, I bring some good news. We are expecting to be ready to release a beta version of the new release next week, and that will be a public beta, available to all. Then following a few short weeks of intense user testing and feedback actioning, we should be able to promote it to a stable release.

 

Client Area

 

In Version 5.0, we launched our new brand new client area theme based on the Bootstrap CSS framework from Twitter, providing a modern, clean and most importantly cross-compatible experience with all major browsers. And in V5.1, we have incorporated some of the ideas that came from users, and upgraded to the latest Bootstrap release which brings some additional functionality and compatability improvements.

 

 

P.S. We knew we had made the right decision in choosing Bootstrap with the amazing feedback we got from you guys, but now some of our competitors have followed our lead in using the Bootstrap framework themselves which only serves to prove it further.

 

Admin Order Real-Time Summary

 

When creating an order from the admin side, the process has now been enhanced to show product prices and totals based on the selections you make – as you make them. This works in conjunction with the new on demand promo creation feature which will also be introduced in the upcoming release and combined, provides a much more powerful and easy to use admin order creation process.

 

 

Ajaxified Network Status Checker

 

The client area network status page is where your clients go to check the status of your hosting network. It allows you to post network related issues and notices, and for clients to check the status of individual services on servers. However, up until now, the queries to check servers have been handled server side, and thus as your server list grew, the page would take longer to load. And not only that but should one of the servers be down or unreachable, it would delay the page loading even further while that ping was attempted. So the solution… ajax of course! So now the page will load immediately, no matter how many servers you have, and the checks are then initiated via ajax and given in real-time back to the user as soon as they complete.

 

 

Transparent Offsite Card Processing

 

Transparent offsite credit card processing is becoming more and more popular as the requirements for PCI Compliance, and gateways enforcing of them becomes stricter. And so there’s been an explosion in the number of token based offerings by payment gateways, and demand from those using them. At WHMCS we were the first web host billing solution to implement token based billing support, and in the latest release we’ve taken that integration a step further to allow gateway modules to have cards submitted completely offsite via a transparent iframe.

 

 

Now we just need gateways such as Quantum Gateway in the example here to offer more flexibility over the customisation of the remote hosted pages!

 

New Reports

 

Improvements to the core reporting engine mean that reports can now combine both textual and graphical based data representations to provide you with better and easier to interpret insights into the data contained within your WHMCS system. New reports and graphs include annual income, clients by country, income by product and new customers.

 

 

There's more neat things I'd love to share, but this blog post is already long enough!

 

The release isn't far away now, but keep all those suggestions and comments coming in - we're still implementing as many of them as we can in the time remaining.