Mercury - 5 modules in one!

[Kian]

Mercury is a revolution for WHMCS, a feature-rich platform designed to simplify user interaction.

You can manage News, Docs, Changelog, Development and much more, in one place, quickly and intuitively.

Discover / Purchase »

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Start spreading the News!

Mercury provides you with a News section to communicate with your customers. Everything is perfectly integrated, with as many as 3 widgets available.

• Thanks to the author profile, signature, role and profile image are customizable by each administrator
• Scheduled automated publishing tool

You will easily manage the creation and publication of news and establish a link with your readers.

Documentation

A Docs section always available to show your customers the features and the use of products and make learning faster.

• Each product is a category
• General categories for articles not concerning specific products
• Anchor navigation within the articles

By providing detailed documentation, you will be able to simplify and streamline ticket support. Your customers will find most of the information they need here.

Welcome to the Lab!

Lab is a new concept. A meeting point where customers actively participate in product development.

• Make a request for a Feature or a Bug-fix in a few steps
• Get and organize customer feedback in a snap
• Rating system to rate existing features
• Dedicated widgets available, for a perfect integration

Now you can focus on important things. Thanks to the ranking algorithm you will immediately know which features are most interesting for your users. A small revolution in your development model.

Changelog? Done

With Mercury comes one more big news. You can show everyone the evolution of your projects and inform customers about changes in your releases.

• Each release will have an associated changelog
• Real-time changelog creation interface
• Ability to add images to the changelog
• Intuitive and accessible frontend template, with dedicated widget

Finally the changelog is gonna be quick to write and very easy to browse.

Your control center

Given the large number of features, you need a place to keep everything under control. The Dashboard is designed for this, Mercury at a glance.

• For each section, display what require your attention
• Add and organize notes on the fly directly in the to-do list

The Dashboard is your starting point, an overview of what's going on and a quick access point for all of the Mercury sections.

SEO

Mercury automatically manages URL rewriting for News, Documentation, Lab and Changelogs to consolidate your presence on the web.

• Locale specific Friendly URL
• Safe from duplicate content
• Proper use of canonical URL

We took care of everything even of the maleficent Black Hat SEO techniques implementing features that automatically detects and nullify these activities.

Katamaze technology

Mercury includes a number of proprietary technologies that enhance the user experience for both the administrator and visitors.

• SorTables for displaying data
• Multilingual content with HereLang
• Optimal data entry with MagicInput

Discover / Purchase »

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Screenshots - Click to expand

Discover / Purchase »

Edited July 10, 2018 by Kian

[Kian]

V1.0.0 Released on 07/02/2018

This is the first Mercury release. If you experience issues, please submit a bug-report. If you have suggestions for improvements please let us know by using request a feature.

 

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V1.0.1 Released on 02/03/2018

As already discussed in Lab, In this release we started to implement Support Module bringing you new tools to improve ticket management with features like Premium (paid) support, emergency reports and a system that informs customers about the estimated wait times on tickets.

New:

• Management of: working days, hours, breaks, holidays
• Offer Premium (paid) support to your customers
• Emergency tickets used by customers to report urgent issues
• Widget to notify unpaid Premium ticket

Improved:

• Anchor labels in Docs formatted properly

 

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V1.0.2 Released on 10/04/2018

This is a corrective release. There aren't new features or changes that are worth to mention. We've updated big portions of the code to improve software maintainability and efficiency for PHP 7.1 and 7.2.

Improved:

• In-depth code optimization
• Export to spreadsheet without limitations in numer of rows & columns
• Exported spreadsheets support multi-language

 

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V1.0.3 Released on 24/05/2018

As previously discussed in our Lab, when customers submit feature requests or bug reports in the Lab they tend to think that no one is reading their messages because there are no follow-ups.

For this reason we decided to implement email notifications so that customers receive a notification when they submit requests, when an administrator is reading and when their requests is approved. This will increase customers' perception when they use the Lab.

We've also added a new customizable widget, improved MagicInput and Support module.

New:

• Email notification to customers for submitting feature request / bug report
• Email notification to customers when an administrator is reviewing their feature request / bug report
• Email notification to customers when their feature request / bug report is approved
• All the new email notifications are available in English and Italian and can be customized from Email Templates
• Support module: new variables available to display your working week
• New widget to display latest releases of products owned by customers

Improved:

• MagicInput: colorpicker has been updated with new features and style
• Small improvements to Packages.tpl and License.tpl files
• The structure of all PHP classes and methods has been optimized

 

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V1.0.4 Released on 10/07/2018

In this release we focus on perfecting small details.

First off we developed a brand new number selector in MagicInput. You can increase and decrease the value with keyboard, scroll wheel and +/- buttons. To ease the process we also implemented a feature that increases the growing of the number exponentially over time. It also supports prefix, suffix, min/max value and number format. The longer you press the more the growth increases. Click here to take a look.

If you clicked the previous link and your're reading this changelog from our website then you've already noticed the other new feature we implemented. From now on in Mercury all links that point to an image will open in a modal!

Apart from some other improvements we have also included new scripts that will be used with next release. We don't want to spoiler details but you can expect something cool

New:

• Brand new number selector (MagicInput)
• When you link to an image it now opens in a modal without leaving the page
• Images in modals are pre-loaded therefore they will show up with no delays
• New styling function that will be used in future releases to color specific elements progressively based on warning levels

Improved:

• Changelog frontend: categories (New, Improved, Changed...) are now ordered properly
• Date/Time formatter classes notably improved
• Request feature / Report bug. Sidebar no longer visible to non-logged users
• Changelog: attached images will always open in Gallery view instead of modals

Changed:

• Small changes to core PHP class of the module

Edited July 10, 2018 by Kian

[Kian]

V1.0.5 Released on 03/09/2018

We updated several core classes we use in all our modules. Changes are small but important. In next release we'll focus on implementing a blog in Mercury. Send us your suggestions from our Lab.

New:

• Added links to documentation in Settings page

Improved:

• Lot of improvements to MagicInput
• SVG files are considered as images by File Uploader
• More efficient regex rules for File Uploader
• CSS of Documentation
• General imporvements in the following classes: Language, Setting, Installer

Fixed:

• Small bug in our Date class that was showing an "ugly" format: 365 days instead of 1 year
• It was possible to insert a decimal number in Ticket Processing Time
• Docs: small scrolling issue involving sidebar

[Kian]

V1.1.0 Released on 07/09/2018

This is a major release in which we introduce a new concept. As we previously discussed in our Lab, there was a missing piece in Mercury: a Blog.
Finally you can maintain a corporate Blog to reach the goals of your organization. You no longer have to mix offical news with more informal blog posts. Keep them separate and distinct to get the best of both world.
The new blogging platform is fully equiped with 4 widgets that you can use to integrate it in your WHMCS with a simple copy-paste (preview). Next to this major change, we have also improved other secondary aspects.

New:

• Blogging platform
• 4 widgets to integrate the Blog with your WHMCS
• New section in Settings page to customize the way your Blog will work
• Blog uses our HereLang technology
• Make use of File Uploader to create awesome posts full of images
• Lab Requests: now you can see the date of submissions made by customers

Improved:

• Removed some unnecessary scripts
• MagicInput: lot of improvements in our number selector
• Small improvements in CSS and template files
• Small improvements in Utilities PHP class

Related News: Blog for WHMCS & Commission Manager Refactoring

[Daniel]

This looks great!

One question, is the Labs feature similar to Uservoice/Useresponse? Letting customers post feature requests and others can vote on them?

[Kian]

I don't know how Uservoice and Useresponse work but yes, customers can post features (or report bugs) and others can vote and/or comment them. All requests must be approved by an admin.

Voting is a simple "drag & drop" process (preview) where clients create their own priority list. We decided to use this approach instead of the classic 5 star rating system because this way people have compare every requests instead of just spamming 4 or 5 starts everywhere (people want everything 😛).

Clients can also add comments (preview) on all existing requests only if they have the right to do so (eg. if a request is about product X I can comment only if I own it). All comments can be reviewed by admins. They can like or dislike or convert comments into requests (preview).

Lastly the module uses both information (votes and comments) to calculate ratings for each feature from a scale that goes from 0% (no one wants it) to 100% (most wanted feature).

 

[Kian]

V1.1.1 Released on 13/09/2018

We improved several aspects of Mercury including an annoying bug described in our Lab.
The most relevant change is that Mercury is now fully compatible with the new TinyMCE text editor (preview) that has been introduced in version 7.6 of WHMCS.
We have great plans for the future. We're considering to implement Social Media Auto Publish on Mercury. Stay tuned.

New:

• The new TinyMCE of WHMCS 7.6.x is fully supported

Improved:

• Depending on WHMCS version in use, Mercury will use correct TinyMCE
• Compatibility with the FontAwesome 5
• Clients Releases (Widget) now only shows published releases
• Empty Widgets (eg. no news, posts, releases etc.) looks better now
• Request features / Bug Reports: character count is more accurate
• When Admin has no default language set in WHMCS the installer will use English
• Small improvements to Installer

[Kian]

V1.2.0 Released on 19/09/2018

Most of the changes we made in this release are "invisible" but still relevant.
If you are familiar with social media marketing campaigns, you have probably heard about the Open Graph Protocol and OG tags. For detailed information about OG tags read the official guide written by Facebook.
We updated Mercury to support Open Graph Protocol so that all your news and blog posts are now fully compatible with this technology.
Moreover we've also implemented Language Overrides so that you can translate Mercury language files like you are already doing for WHMCS.

New:

• Open Graph Protocol support
• Module's Language files overrides. Customize translations in the same way you do for WHMCS

Improved

• Canonical URL in head are now absolute

Related screenshots:

[Kian]

V1.2.1 Released on 24/09/2018

With the introduction of Open Graph Protocol in the previous release, we're now making another step toward a better SEO with Sitemap generator.
Mercury allows to create contents for your WHMCS website. There are news, blog posts, lab entries and articles of documentation. With this release all these contents will be included in the sitemap.
For more information about this feature and its settings, please read the documentation.

New:

• Sitemap generator for news, blog posts, lab entries and articles of documentation
• SystemURL overriding for sitemap. Ideal to use if your WHMCS is accessible from multiple domains/aliases
• Add static URLs in the automatically generated sitemap
• Mercury now stores last modified date for news, blog posts, lab entries and articles of documentation

Improved

• Small improvements to Open Graph Protocol

[Kian]

Since 24/29/2018, Mercury received 6 new updates. Below I'm going to provide a recap with the most important changes:

• Automatic updates
• Changes to File Uploader (easier interactions, inherently more secure, ligher to use, less storage space used)
• Support for lastest version of MySQL
• Improvements to MagicInput
• Inhibition of Directory Browsing

Full changelog is available here.

Edited November 6, 2018 by Kian

[Kian]

We've just released version 1.3.0 that allows you to provide Live Demos to potential customers.

The second good news is that we use this feature ourselves therefore starting from now you can try Mercury, Billing Extension and Payments Bundle. To make your demo experience even easier, we've added in the interface of our demo platforms 3 new features that allows you to simulate the daily Cron of WHMCS, Reinstall demo environment with new sets of data and manage your demo session.

[Mandalorian]

Great. Could you make a stand-alone module for Sitemaps?

[Kian]

Sitemaps are generated on a daily basis based on news, blog posts, documentation and lab entries of Mercury. Sitemap generator has nothing to index without such contents 🙄

[Mandalorian]

Hi Kian,

Thanks for replying.

We create custom pages using another module, and also create posts in knowledgbase, and announcements. We are looking for a module to automatically create Sitemaps for those pages and posts. 🙂

[Kian]

For sure it's doable with a standalone script that scans for KB and Announcements of WHMCS, rebuilds the URL based on your SEO settings and puts everything in sitemap.xml. Custom pages probably should be added manually since most of the time they're rewritten in .htaccess.

Problem is I have no time in this precise moment but this is in my to-do list.

[brian!]

On 30/12/2018 at 22:24, rdomains said:

We create custom pages using another module, and also create posts in knowledgbase, and announcements. We are looking for a module to automatically create Sitemaps for those pages and posts.

not wishing the hijack the thread, but did you see the post in the thread below.... untested, but if it works, that could be modified to do the same for announcements etc...

[Mandalorian]

Repost-below 

Edited January 2, 2019 by rdomains
Repost-below with a quote

[Mandalorian]

23 hours ago, Kian said:

For sure it's doable with a standalone script that scans for KB and Announcements of WHMCS, rebuilds the URL based on your SEO settings and puts everything in sitemap.xml. Custom pages probably should be added manually since most of the time they're rewritten in .htaccess.

Problem is I have no time in this precise moment but this is in my to-do list.

Hope you'll find time for that, Kian! 

All the best!

[Mandalorian]

1 hour ago, brian! said:

not wishing the hijack the thread, but did you see the post in the thread below.... untested, but if it works, that could be modified to do the same for announcements etc...

Thank you for hijacking Brian 😄 Happy new year!

Your feedback is always the most valuable. Much appreciated.

I checked the thread, it's really helpful, thanks. 

I am a novice, unlike you. Please could you advise on how the code above be modified to create sitemaps for custom pages (created with a module called WHMCMS) and announcements? 

Best,

Frazer

[brian!]

1 hour ago, rdomains said:

I checked the thread, it's really helpful, thanks. 

quickly tested it locally and it doesn't work for me... perhaps cos some of the kb articles in my dev have titles with Spanish characters in... could probably make it work if I had to though.

if it did work, then you could do the same for announcements as that would be a similar database query to the one for knowledgebase...

$result = mysqli_query($db,"SELECT * FROM tblannouncements");

technically, the query would need to be more than that as you'd have to check they were published announcements etc.

for WHMCMS, that's probably one for you to contact sentq about - that's his baby and I don't know if there is a database table that you can query in a similar way that contains details of the custom pages - he will know though. 🙂

that said, I would have thought that there were plenty of free online sitemap generators available outside of WHMCS, that you wouldn't really need a sitemap generator within WHMCS?

[Mandalorian]

Hey Brian,

Again, great to have your feedback 🙂

You're right, could generate sitemap outside of WHMCS. That's the way to go!

Cheers mate!

[Kian]

This morning I was updating this thread since we're now on version 1.3.3 but I had an idea. I wanted to include a new feature that sends an email to WHMCS administrators of your choice as soon as a new version of Mercury is available. It was already part of another module of mine (Billing Extension) therefore on paper it was an easy task. I was wrong! I wasted 2 hours debugging a PHP class... I didn't notice a shorthand if 🤬 In the end I improved few more things and now after 7 hours version 1.3.4 is ready for download.

Notify to selected administrators:

Email notification:

Info box:

[zitu4life]

@Kian Mercury looks fine, I am thinking give it a try, as Mercury has NEWS and BLOG...witch also we could consider it is related to customization on front end , you could think add to mercury a FRONTEND (with customization's facility), to make it one stop module and state of art WHMCS module 

[Kian]

Sorry, I have just noticed your reply to this thread.

 

Like I have already said you via PM, the idea is that Mercury will have a sort of site-builder where you can change colors on the fly, create mutiple versions of the same template (one for christmas, one for labour day etc.), upload banners for sliders with all the necessary options (settings for animations, URLs, call to actions etc.), add, remove and move widgets on the fly just dragging them on the page (latest news, latest posts, top features etc.). Below you can find a preview (click to enlarge).

 

The problem is that we had to pause this project because at the moment we're:

• Working on Electronic invoicing for Slovenia and Portugal
• Implementing RCTI/GST and ABN lookups for Australian companies in Billing Extension, Commission Manager and Affiliates on WHMCS (this mess 🤢)
• Creating a new module that allows to use multiple domains/subdomains on the same WHMCS like we do on our own website (katamaze.it in italian language, katamaze.com in english) and also multiple brands. For each brand you will be able to:
  • Set a Template
  • Define Default Language
  • Hide/Show specific Products/Services
  • Hide/Show specific Support Departments
  • Have different logo on invoices
  • Allow/Disallow registered customers to order from other brands
• Report a bug (maybe?) to ionCube
• Move into a new house
• Move into a new office
• Complete 2x custom projects
• Watch Solo: A Star Wars Story... I bet that it is no longer available in theaters...
• I need to reserve a table for dinner tonight otherwise I'm a dead man
• I need a vacation 😩

Edited September 4, 2019 by Kian

[Kian]

We're now at version 1.3.15 and here's the recap of what happened during the latest 11 releases.

• Improved SEO and shareability on Social Media with:
  • Multi-language Meta Descriptions for news, blog posts, documentation and Lab
  • OG Tags notably improved
  • Meta Descriptions for "generic" pages can be freely customized by editing language files
• Google Code Prettify has been integrated (preview)
• New Widget to display Recent News (preview)
• Ticket Response Time based on your working days, working hours and holidays
• Reduced loading times for SorTables
• The core of Mercury has been notably changed. Long story short it runs faster
• Lot of fallbacks to support third-party templates and weird PHP configurations