Automatic Price Updating when Price is Changed

[microvb]

To me, this seems like an essential feature -- When you change the price of something, the price change is automatically reflected on all accounts that have the product or service which was changed.

 

It is 2017 -- why is this not built-in yet ?

 

 

Your options are :

 

Buy a plugin (which the author now charges an annual subscription for)

Use the "bulk pricing updater" addon -- great, if you ONLY want to update one product at a time, and don't mind changing the price in several places.

 

This is such a pain in the ass -- especially when it comes to domain pricing where you wish to offer service for multiple years, each year for each domain needs to be manually entered THREE times: Renewal, Transfer, and Registration.

 

You have done a wonderful job in revamping the UI bringing it to a more modern look and feel for my customers, but the administration side is still quite lacking, resulting in screwed up bills -- if they go out at all.

 

What I would like to see is the following :

 

* Fast domain price updates with CALCULATION built in - This means that if I enter the price once, and it is automatically calculated for the number of years I wish to offer for. Some people may wish to override the calculated total (discounts for multiple years, etc) - so allow them to do so.

* Free domain for first year with hosting offering, should still show up in hosting renewal invoice.

* When updating the price of something - ANYTHING - have an option to automatically update the price for that product everywhere.

* Add reports to show what billing is coming up. This is especially useful for domain renewals as they need to be renewed typically 30 days prior.

* The current system only sends the invoice out after the domain has reached it's expiration date. You can configure to send invoice notices early, but this affects ALL services. I see no reason why I should harrass my clients by sending them their HOSTING invoice 30 or more days prior to their hosting renewal date. 7 days prior seems to work just fine. This is not the case with domains which need to be acted on more promptly. Adjusting the billing for each domain to something other than the expiration of the domain, is not a good work-around. When a domain is bundled with hosting, the domain notice should still be sent out earlier than the hosting invoice.

 

You also need to update your OpenSRS module to the official one written by Tucows @ OpenSRS. The module you supply is broken and has been for some time now.

 

In addition, whenever you release a new "major" version number, you don't provide any patch for rolling up from the previous version. There are NO clear instructions on how to proceed safely.

 

Additionally, your archives are zip and do not contain proper permissions on the folders. Prior to archiving your distribution, which should be done in tar.gz, you should set the read/write modifications to what is optimal for your application (world writable / etc) on everything is not acceptable.

 

To be clear, these are not suggestions. These are usability issues that make this application very clunky.

 

Again, thank you for updating the front-end, as your system template engine made it impossible to do anything even close to what you did, due to the fact that users can not alter the code of many key files responsible for processing/drawing the data -- modification of templates has been there, however consolidating information in the manner which you have done was not feasible as the scripts written to render the template files did not have all that information available to push to the template.

 

A couple other things :

 

* The table naming convention used is horrible. Every table starts with 'tbl' which is hard-coded iuto your system. Additionally, every table name does not have any _ separating the words used which makes it a PITA to scroll through by reading. The prefix used kills the use of any type-ahead capability in modern DBA applications (typing in Listview to jump to selected match).

* The file naming convention is still erratic, and follows a similar horrible naming convention as used in the table structure (Perhaps the source is obfuscated using IonCube because you don't want anyone to see how horrible the source is - possibling seeing conventions like `function $oOOo( $O, $Oo ) { $o = $O + $Oo; return $o; }` )

 

I sincerly hope you can take these notes seriously enough to implement them. I have seen comments regarding the majority of what I have mentioned spread through the forums, with inadequate reponses. You provide probably the most popular application for this type of service, and while it does accomplish a lot, it is still lacking. If there was a viable alternative that supported my domain providers and hosting application, I would have likely switched to that many years ago. It is both suprising, and depressing that no one has written anything more stable, and that WHMCS has not taken the time to correct fundamental billing issues which should have been fixed in the 3rd or 4th major milestone release.

[brian!]

Your options are :

 

Buy a plugin (which the author now charges an annual subscription for)

it's only 5 Euros a year - that's hardly going to break the bank... now whether you should use it, or trust the developer to keep it updated, is another matter.

 

This is such a pain in the ass -- especially when it comes to domain pricing where you wish to offer service for multiple years, each year for each domain needs to be manually entered THREE times: Renewal, Transfer, and Registration.

if you have multiple TLDs using the exact same pricing (.uk, .co.uk, .org.uk), then you simply duplicate the TLD ("Duplicate TLD" button) and the settings/pricing (for all years & currencies) will be duplicated... i'm always surprised that the domain pricing documentation doesn't mention that.

 

What I would like to see is the following :

WHMCS will tell you these are all feature requests, and suggest you go to the requests site and submit them - but i'm not constrained by that principle!

 

* Fast domain price updates with CALCULATION built in - This means that if I enter the price once, and it is automatically calculated for the number of years I wish to offer for. Some people may wish to override the calculated total (discounts for multiple years, etc) - so allow them to do so.

i've seen that done in WHMCS and I think it was working with v5...

 

https://forum.whmcs.com/showthread.php?67527-Cant-find-admin-quot-Open-Pricing-quot-template&p=292863#post292863

 

quickly tried it in a v7.2b dev, but didn't work - though i'm sure someone could get it to work with v7.

 

* Free domain for first year with hosting offering, should still show up in hosting renewal invoice.

* When updating the price of something - ANYTHING - have an option to automatically update the price for that product everywhere.

* Add reports to show what billing is coming up. This is especially useful for domain renewals as they need to be renewed typically 30 days prior.

you could still use the admin widget I posted for v6 - that will show you hosting, domain and product addon renewals for the next x days... at some point, i'll rewrite it for v7 but I was waiting to see if the v7.2beta made any changes to widgets first... so far it hasn't, but WHMCS have the habit of sneaking new features into the full release that weren't in the betas..

 

https://forum.whmcs.com/showthread.php?105270-Admin-Home-Page-Widget-for-Upcoming-Hosting-Renewals-v6-template

 

and if you want to change it into a report, then you just need to use the SQL queries with the widget.

 

* The current system only sends the invoice out after the domain has reached it's expiration date. You can configure to send invoice notices early, but this affects ALL services. I see no reason why I should harrass my clients by sending them their HOSTING invoice 30 or more days prior to their hosting renewal date. 7 days prior seems to work just fine. This is not the case with domains which need to be acted on more promptly. Adjusting the billing for each domain to something other than the expiration of the domain, is not a good work-around. When a domain is bundled with hosting, the domain notice should still be sent out earlier than the hosting invoice.

http://docs.whmcs.com/Automation_Settings#Billing_Settings

 

Billing Settings

These settings determine invoice generation and when your customers are reminded to make payments. Setting the Unpaid and Overdue Reminder settings to 0 will prevent that email from being sent.

 

Invoice Generation

This is the number of days before the due date invoices will be generated. Eg. If this setting is 7 then an invoice will be generated 7 days before the due date for products, services, addons & domains and your customer emailed.

Per Billing Cycle Settings

By clicking the Advanced Settings link you can specify a different invoice generation setting for each billing cycle. For example you may wish invoices for monthly services to be generated 7 days in advance while invoices for annual services are generated 14 days in advance.

Domain Invoice Generation

This is an optional setting that allows you to specify how far in advance domain renewal invoices should generate. You can use this if you want to give a longer time between the generation and due date for domain invoices, particularly useful in cases where payments are not taken online and so more time might be necessary to avoid domain expiry.

 

Leave this setting blank if you want all invoices to be generated the same.

also, note that it's the due date that will trigger invoicing - not the expiry date.

 

i'll skip the other suggestions to save time, as I wouldn't really expect WHMCS to do anything you've suggested (including those above) - certainly, not in any meaningful amount of time.

[WHMCS Edward]

Hello,

 

Thank you for taking the time to provide your feedback, we appreciate it!

 

I wanted to pick up and respond to a couple of your points.

 

To me, this seems like an essential feature -- When you change the price of something, the price change is automatically reflected on all accounts that have the product or service which was changed.

 

It is 2017 -- why is this not built-in yet ?

I understand this feature is available through an official add-on that is bundled with WHMCS, but you are looking for it to be available via the product and domain interfaces. That would be a great feature request.

 

You also need to update your OpenSRS module to the official one written by Tucows @ OpenSRS. The module you supply is broken and has been for some time now.

 

Can you let me know what the issue is you're experiencing with the built-in module because as far as I know, it should be working.

 

In addition, whenever you release a new "major" version number, you don't provide any patch for rolling up from the previous version. There are NO clear instructions on how to proceed safely.

 

We provide incremental releases for all minor versions. For major versions, it is important to ensure all your files are up to date and therefore we encourage the use of the full release. It is perfectly safe to upgrade using a full release zip file since all customisations are made via templates, hooks and modules, all of which will be unaffected by uploading a fresh copy of the core files to your installation. Of course now we also have Automatic Updates available.

 

Additionally, your archives are zip and do not contain proper permissions on the folders. Prior to archiving your distribution, which should be done in tar.gz, you should set the read/write modifications to what is optimal for your application (world writable / etc) on everything is not acceptable.

 

Permissions should be set appropriately in the zip file downloads. Can you let us know what files or folders you were seeing set incorrectly?

 

-Ed