Mercury - 5 modules in one!

[Kian]

Version 1.3.19 is out. Here is a recap of what happened from 1.3.15 to 1.3.19.

• Various improvements to Live Demo (meta tags, tagline, jQuery, email notifications)
• Lot of improvements to sitemap stucture and functionalities. Here more details
• Documentation & Lab entries. They both support featured image and author name like News and Blog Posts
• Documentation sidebar shows number of articles in each category and the picture of the related product (see the image below)

But maybe the most intresting fact is that Mercury support JSON-LD Structured Data for Google and for all other search engines:

• Articles of Documentation are categorized as TechArticle
• For News we have NewsArticle
• BlogPosting for blog posts
• For Lab entries (feature requests and bug reports) we use Article

Below we included an example for all categories. If you want to see Structured Data in action, feel free to visit our WHMCS website. We're already using Structured Data for all posts, news, docs and lab projects.

Edited April 24, 2020 by Kian

[Kian]

Okay, the latest version is HUGE.

Multi-domain, Multi-brand, IP Geolocation

I decided to kill another module of mine (Advanced Localisation). Why? I moved all its features into Mercury so starting from now there's a big surprise. A screenshot is worth a thousand words so here you go.

You can configure an unlimited number of domains and subdomains to get a setup like Wikipedia for multilingual pages and mix it with multiple brands like follows:

• it.example.com
• en.example.com
• fr.example.com
• another-brand.de
• another-brand.us

Each domain can be set to use a specific language, currency, template and cart template. Multi-domain functionalities extend to email notifications to ensure that customers don't land on the wrong domain. For example if a visitor requests password reset from example.it, he receives the reset link from the same domain. This is valid also for invoice links, quotes, affiliate URLs, support tickets, email signature, login and logout.

Next to multi-domain, Mercury also integrates IP geolocation service (it uses IPStack API). It works with both IPv4 and IPv6 and I store a cookie to make sure you don't send unnecessary requests. You can create country-based rules that affect user-experience depending on location. Such rules can be used on languages, templates, cart templates and domains like in the following example.

Frequently Asked Questions:

Q: Can I use it to hide/show products and support departments based on domain and location?

A: Yes but no. I have already coded this kind of solution in a module that I never released. Probably it would require me a couple of hours to integrate it in Mercury but right know I'm not willing to do that because I already know what would happen next... invoice from multiple brands... I will not repeat the same mistake again 🤐

Q: How does it work for domains?

A: Look at our site. We have two domains. Same WHMCS. katamaze.it is in italian and katamaze.com in english. All it takes is an A record that points to your server and place this snippet.

Q: What if I login from site A and visit site B?

A: You will result logged in only on site A. There was a way to automatically perform login & logout on all the available domains via AutoAuth but WHMCS decided that this feature is deprecated and will be removed in v8.1. I spent weeks to make it working with AutoAuth and the idea that I have to repeat the same thing with Single Sign-On is depressing. I won't do that.

Q: You said that the module uses IPStack API. Is it free?

It's free up to 10.000 requests per month. Every time I successfully localise a visitor, I set a cookie that lasts for 30 days. This way you don't waste too many requests localising visitors on every page load. I tried to contact IPStack to get a special deal for WHMCS/Mercury users but as always nobody answer to my emails not even for 1.000.000 $ so don't blame me.

Sidebars

Before this release, we were using WHMCS sidebars logic but they were difficult to customize and style so we decided to get rid of them. All new sidebars can be edited from template files. Here's the new look of sidebars with new widgets (random posts, featured products, related news, navigation menu...). There's also "estimated reading time" and "word count" for articles.

 

Edited June 9, 2020 by Kian

[Kian]

Comment System

We have now added another important functionality to WHMCS & Mercury. Visitors, registered users and administrators can engage with your contents posting comments and replies. You can selectively enable comments for news, blog posts and articles of documentation.

People can comment with MarkDown editor that supports both Google reCAPTCHA v2 and Invisible reCAPTCHA v3 to protect you from bots. Moreover you can also enable comment moderation to prevent comments from appearing on your site without your express approval. You can view, filter, export, edit, delete and approve comments from this page.

Mercury incorporates Bulk moderation (first image) but you can also moderate comments one by one (second image). Obviously comments posted by administrators don't require approval.

As if it wasn't enough, Mercury automatically detects links in comments and automatically sets them as "nofollow", "noopener" with target "_blank". The only exception are domains configured in multi-brand and multi-domain and of course your default domain. We didn't stop here. There's nothing more confusing than having comments in multiple languages. Tthat's why in Mercury comments are separated for different languages! 😍

FAQ

Q: What about 5 characters verification code?

5 character verification code is NOT supported as it is proven to be useless (any bot can bypass it). There's really no point in annoying visitors and customers with this useless captcha. Keep in mind that I designed comment system to automatically turn off if you use 5 character verification code. I refuse to implement it. I took this decision because as I was coding this feature in Mercury, I received a lot of spam on my dev installation of WHMCS... I was using 5 character verification...

Q: Can I "Like" comments?

Not yet but I have plans to implement it.

Q: Can I set a nickname?

Not yet but I have plans to give users the possibility to set nicknames and upload an avatar.

Q: What happens when I receive a reply to my comment?

You would expect to receive an email isn't it? This is currently not supported but I will add this feature for sure. Give me a couple of weeks 😭 I'm not Rambo

[Kian]

Service Level Agreement

You can finally handle SLA in WHMCS. You create and sell your support plans like follows.

Mercury allows to define your:

• Working days (eg. Monday to Friday)
• Working hours (eg. 09:00 to 13:00, lunch break, 14:00 to 18:00)
• Holidays (Christmas, national holidays...)

Based on your working hours, Mercury automatically sends "SLA Reminders" to the selected WHMCS Administrators like follows.

The email provides all details about SLA-tickets including a countdown. Such reminder can be sent every X minutes non-stop as long as there are still SLA-tickets awaiting reply. Here is how you can define your service level.

As you can see Mercury can also automatically refund the customer for each failure directly on next invoice (renewal) like follows.

Next to "SLA Reminders", Mercury also changes WHMCS Support Tickets page to let you focus on SLA-tickets.

To avoid any possible confusion, let me show you the difference between a SLA with Outside Working Hours (OWH) enabled and disabled.

Ticket Open	OWH enabled	OWH disabled
Monday @ 09:00	Due within 10:00	Due within 10:00
Monday @ 12:50	Due within 13:50	Due within 14:50
Friday @ 17:50	Due within 18:50	Due within next Monday at 09:50
Chirstmas @ 09:00	Due within 10:00	Due within next working day at 10:00

 

Edited July 13, 2020 by Kian

[Kian]

Brand & Domain-based Contents

New option to display blog posts, news and article of documentation depending on brands/domains in use.

Fully Customizable SEO Friendly URLs

Mercury was already supporting SEO Friendly URLs but starting from version 1.4.7 we give you the option to manually define them. Let us show you an example.

The above image shows an article that is available in english and italian languages. For the english version we specified a custom SEO URL meaning that the URL of the article will be something like example.com/blog/1/welcome. For the italian version Mercury will automatically generate the SEO URL based on the title of the article so that we have example.com/blog/1/benvenuto-nel-sito.

In order to support this new feature, we updated the integrated Anti Black Hat SEO and Sitemap generator.

[Kian]

Extended support for IP Geolocation

We extended IP geolocation to automatically pre-select country and telephone number prefix based on user's location. Moreover we also provide an accurate estimate taxes for visitors placing orders.

[sahostking]

Interesting. Looks quite good. May have to test this soon after get approval from management :)