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Wish List for WHMCS v8


yggdrasil

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Not everyone is happy with the general way v7 is going, (v6 and v5 where better) and since it seems v8 is coming next year or is planned at least. What are your main wish lists for that new version looking it from a developer or business view. What do you like WHMCS to change, improve or even remove in the future?

Here is my list:

More opt-in

Make things more opt-in. Some things in v7 are not useful for more advanced users, like auto update, or the market store. I would like to have that stuff removed. Now I have more files and more bloat on my installation which I don't use and never will. This things should come as a separated module and if they are disabled or not installed, the code should not even be live in your server for security reasons, performance and just general simplicity. Less is more sometimes and many of those features I don't require as they are targeted to click one night operations, and not more longer power users that want to tweak and adapt WHMCS to their own operations.

Bug Tracking

A better bug tracker. Asking with a ticket if a bug is fixed or having to hunt down the change long on each release is painful and time consuming. Sometimes I think WHMCS as a company is very inefficient with some operations. Hiring people costs them money, so why do they want to babysit things like this. Having to answer tickets costs them time and this could be avoided with a proper bug tracker. This can't scale.

Better feedback from users

Feature requests. This is completely broken. Why use a different system when you have a nice community here? Build the feature requests and vote system here. If you don't want to build a bug tracker, you can even do the same here on the community for bugs and only customers with a valid license can access assuming WHMCS does not want to make this public.

Slow down with features

Longer releases. This could be a bit controversial but I would rather prefer WHMCS to slow down a bit. Every new release introduces more bugs than features. The Beta testing should be longer and I would be ok with maybe only 2 major releases per year. Just keep releasing patches for bugs. They are adding so many new things which are related to external services and I don't think they are aware the minefield they are creating. WHMCS should not be heavily coded to work with remote stuff. Try to build more things that work locally in your server instead of just releasing new features that require third party services.

Longer Releases

Longer LTS releases. They are not long releases if they only last a year. Look how Microsoft does it, 10-15 years. Or even Red Hat. The people using LTS are companies or enterprises and I'm not saying WHMCS should support them 10 years, but seriously 1 year or just a bit longer? Most developers even support their normal releases for at least 3 years. The LTS should be a minimum 3 years unless the PHP or code they rely on is not supported anymore, which is a different story. Can you imagine if everyone else did the same to WHMCS developers? Imagine if PHP was only supported 1 year, or Smarty, or anything. It would be a nightmare for them. So if they are aware that they rely on such much external code now, they should give the same considerations towards their customers. Not everyone has the time to update and make all their integrations the day they are released. This is a billing and cloud/hosting automation software. Not a blog like WordPress!!! And with that I mean security patches. Not even bug fixes. They don't have to even fix bugs or release new features on those versions. But please, at least still support them with security patches for 3 years after launch. It's the responsible thing to do.

Better Mobile

Mobile app is not updated for years. Show more love or open it up so we can add things. I have to rely on external services for ticket notifications and other things when this makes no sense if you have a mobile app. Instead of building things for something like Slack I'm seriously disappointed that WHMCS developers give more attention to external services then their own products. I can receive mobile notifications on third party services but not push notifications on my WHMCS mobile app. Shocking their own products are left to die.

Finally, open up. You are benefiting from open source developers work but do the opposite to your own customers that are developers.

Open up your code. Please just open up your code or at least the most important chunks to particular partners or companies. Make them sign what ever non disclosure agreement you want or even charge them. Your competition has none of your problems because the community can see and fix things. What is WHMCS so keen to protect here? Business users are not going to stop paying support and updates and they surely are not going to pirate the software. It's a bit childish, in particular because WHMCS would not exist today without open source work from others. WHMCS relies heavily on external third party open source code yet they even encode that. This is an insult to developers. They are taking all the code that is free and releases from other developers, and then pass Ioncube over it. One thing is protecting your code and licensing, the other thing is trying to protect code that is not even yours.

WHMCS is encoding so much garbage that I'm sure this is the root of most of their bugs and problem because we cannot fix or see what they do. This is the biggest downside of using WHMCS. I don't think any serious provider will consider WHMCS for this reason. It's a blackbox.

And I'm not talking here about the core, or billing stuff, or API stuff. No, WHMCS even encode things that affect your public website and cannot be easily modified or changed unless you make hacks around them software. You constantly have to intercept what WHMCS does and then transform the output because you have no idea what it does and how. It's a game I'm not willing to play in the future. Their competition advertises that they are 99% open code and only encode a few files related to the license. I don't expect WHMCS to do this but PLEASE if someone from the company is reading this, this is going to be your doom as a company in the next years. The minute competition comes up and is more open than WHMCS, those people are not coming back. Everyone is opening up in the software and technology industry. Even WHMCS would not exist as a company if it was not for other services developing API's which WHMCS is relies on for most of their connection. This is not the proper way to behave towards your developer customers. What exactly are they are trying to protect is beyond me. Even third party developers like Modules Garden and many others at least have an open version of their encoded modules. Everyone does at this point because they understand business users will not run things on their server they cannot fix, see what it does or just maintain. It's a trust thing. You would sell far more licenses and to people that actually have the money to pay.

Do they distrust their own code so much? Well, the community would be able to constantly improve it with suggestions and fixes. Less work for their developers and the product would move forwards on its own. I just love how your competition works. The whole code is open, their whole bug tracker is open. This is causing frustration to those using the software and worse, forcing them to move out to custom solutions or more open platforms. WHMCS is never going to be flexible this way. And I would not complain about this if it was not for the fact that WHMCS is putting more and more code that was open in the past behind their ioncube wall. v6 and v5 had less encoded code/features, not more. I'm shocked on much WHMCS hates developers or people building their own sites around WHMCS because every new release is worse with more features behind the black box. This is now seriously affecting my business with things I cannot fix anymore or integrate. Everyone in the technology world understand proprietary standards are bad. And this is what WHMCS is doing, they are forcing people to even make simple changes using their own way of doing things. Why would I do this? Why should a PHP developer, or a HTML coder, or a JavaScript person learn how to do things the WHMCS way which is inefficient, buggy and even performs bad on a server?

Those people want to use the standard coding procedures WHMCS developers use. Not the stupid hooks and API to even change something like a link. And I say stupid because this is exactly how I feel about WHMCS v7 at this point. You have to make a special PHP hook code (the WHMCS way) to change the sidebar text, colors or links. In the past I could just open the .tpl file and change it. Why? Because WHMCS is removing code from templates and putting it behind the IonCube wall. One day, the templates will be worthless and most WHMCS websites that are customized are going to be horrible slow because users have to create 240 hooks to change colors, links, or even text.

Personally, I have access to all the database. And if I see v8 is not being more open but more closed. I'm moving out. I cannot trust my business operations to a company that wants to keep their customers under ransom. And this is how I feel when I cannot even fix the most simple bugs because the files are encoded. So my biggest wish list for v8 is for WHMCS to start being more open and trying to move towards that trend. They profit from open source but seem to hate open source which is a rather a strange business approach. One day, some of those developers may change their licenses and forbid their codes from being used in obfuscated software. If that day comes, WHMCS will have to remove that code from their software or change the way they work in terms of developing.

Edited by yggdrasil
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I wouldn't argue with one word of that...

the stuff about bug tracking is interesting - i've been here too long and have just got used to CORE-xxxxx being top secret for staff eyes only.... but taking a step back and thinking about other software bug tracking, yes it should be more accessible.... I found it far better years ago when submitting bugs was done here in the f0rum - you could actually see where the bugs are, and so try to work around them.... with BT being outside of here, then only the person submitting the bug, and WHMCS, know about it - until the next maintenance release and you can see the changelog... that's no way to do it.... at least using older releases, you know where the bugs are and that no new ones will be added - with latest versions, it's Russian roulette where the bugs are and if you're going to hit one.

feature requests is a joke (and sadly not a funny one) - as you say, why have a nice community hall where we can all gather together, but when we want to make a suggestion, we need to go to the little shed at the bottom of the lane and make a note of it in there... it's ridiculous... you get users making feature requests... that nobody else knows have been created... so they then don't receive many votes... so they don't get implemented by WHMCS... and so the frustration builds....

on so many levels, WHMCS is a company that enjoys to shoot itself in the foot by its own actions.

... and if WHMCS development slowed down any more it would be going backwards - but I know what you meant.... less new features, but get them right before launch.

openness applies to communication too... there's no harm in pre-warning us what's going to be in a beta before the code has been released... there might be a crap idea that we can nip in the bud before any coding time is wasted (e.g removing the domain pricing tables and then having to put them back a year later).... once they've released something as a beta, then it's a hell of a task to get a feature removed before general release... and once released, it's in there and then you're left to the feature request path to get it removed... (or apparently just have a few words with some WHMCS employees!). waiting.gif

it's the general pervasive attitude of only WHMCS knows best that does my head in (e.g let's change how invoices are calculated and not even disucss it first), and the subsequence lack of communication - when was the last time they ever did a full survey of it's userbase and ask them what they want in the future releases (I can't ever recall one).... and i'm not counting the requests system in that, because that's a flawed broken system that needs ditching asap.

v8 should be designed from a blank sheet of paper - because if it's just going to be a slight evolution from v7.6, then they might as well call it v7.7 and we can all go and find something else to use.

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12 hours ago, yggdrasil said:

Slow down with features

Longer releases. This could be a bit controversial but I would rather prefer WHMCS to slow down a bit. Every new release introduces more bugs than features. The Beta testing should be longer and I would be ok with maybe only 2 major releases per year. Just keep releasing patches for bugs. They are adding so many new things which are related to external services and I don't think they are aware the minefield they are creating. WHMCS should not be heavily coded to work with remote stuff. Try to build more things that work locally in your server instead of just releasing new features that require third party services.

It's funny how this is the main reason why several softwares (and videogames 😀) I loved evolved into a total mess. I'm a developer too but frankly I don't get this frenzy of adding untested stuff especially when the foundations of the house are buring. I mean when the software is new it's obvious that you have to add features non-stop but yeah, I agree with this point a lot. They should slow down. Quality > Quantity.

12 hours ago, yggdrasil said:

Finally, open up. You are benefiting from open source developers work but do the opposite to your own customers that are developers. 

I know that this may sound unpopular but I'm against it. Open source leads to hundreds of different variations of the same file. Multiply it for hundreds files during a time span of a couple of years and boom! You created Android 😀 the stupidest software ever created by human being. With such a fragmentated software it's impossible to deliver updates even for its publisher. Just look at Wordpress. It's full of "modifications" made by unknown people that expose your website to vulnerabilities. Of course this is just my rigid opinion about open source.

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15 hours ago, yggdrasil said:

Having to answer tickets costs them time and this could be avoided with a proper bug tracker.

I don't disagree here. Make this stuff public so that people can comment on this and hey, instead of having known issues come up over and over again in tickets, well, you can point users there.

Also:
FIX YOUR BUGS!!!

15 hours ago, yggdrasil said:

Feature requests. This is completely broken.

The community hasn't always been here for that, and this should, honestly be separate. I do agree that the WAY that feature requests are implemented needs to be drastically improved, but the current website for it is pretty straightforward. No need to fix anything there.

15 hours ago, yggdrasil said:

Just keep releasing patches for bugs.

I've said this for years now. Quit adding 'massive new features'. START patching bugs. Quit denying bugs exist, and start fixing what are known bugs. I reported a bug years back, and they still refuse to acknowledge it as a bug, or fix it (it is a bug).

15 hours ago, yggdrasil said:

Open up your code

No, no, no, no, no... For exactly this reason:

1 hour ago, Kian said:

Open source leads to hundreds of different variations of the same file.

Open source software is great, for some things... The problem? If you've got something as big as WHMCS, you cannot have people mucking around and editing things.
People already don't update because it'll break their theme changes... More than you care to know.  
All turning this into an open source mess is going to do? Just increase the number of vulnerable installs out there because people have tweaked their source code and stuff.

 

5 hours ago, brian! said:

openness applies to communication too

Yes, yes and yes. sadly, we all know (at least those of us who've been around for a decade or so :)) that this will never ever happen.

 

5 hours ago, brian! said:

when was the last time they ever did a full survey of it's userbase

How about 'never'.  Why? WHMCS staff doesn't care what the users think. More specifically the one person at top doesn't.  We've been shown this time and time again.  That person's opinion is the only one that matters.

 

5 hours ago, brian! said:

i'm not counting the requests system in that, because that's a flawed broken system that needs ditching asap.

Again, I wouldn't call the system 'broken', just how it's used.  If those in charge of development paid more attention to what the users wanted (read: the most popular items) and worked towards getting them done, as requested (not like the auto-update failure mess), then this system has a chance. However, again, this isn't something that's going to happen, at all.

2 hours ago, Kian said:

They should slow down. Quality > Quantity.

Again, I've been saying this for years. It's great that we get so many releases with 'new stuff', but how about fixing stuff, testing stuff thoroughly before releasing it!

There's a reason that people wait until the first release after a major release to update. The major release always, always, always has bugs in it, because it's never thoroughly tested.  

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14 hours ago, Kian said:

It's funny how this is the main reason why several softwares (and videogames 😀) I loved evolved into a total mess. I'm a developer too but frankly I don't get this frenzy of adding untested stuff especially when the foundations of the house are buring. I mean when the software is new it's obvious that you have to add features non-stop but yeah, I agree with this point a lot. They should slow down. Quality > Quantity.

I know that this may sound unpopular but I'm against it. Open source leads to hundreds of different variations of the same file. Multiply it for hundreds files during a time span of a couple of years and boom! You created Android 😀 the stupidest software ever created by human being. With such a fragmentated software it's impossible to deliver updates even for its publisher. Just look at Wordpress. It's full of "modifications" made by unknown people that expose your website to vulnerabilities. Of course this is just my rigid opinion about open source.

That is the problem. They add features and don’t even test to see how they play with other features. Example, they added the Grace/Redemption period features for domains, great, but they forgot to add something as simple as marking those grace/redemption periods with the proper expired tag under the domain lists. This was fixed in 7.6 but on my version 7.5 those domains don’t show as expired under domains. And I'm not even starting to use 7.5 yet, it took me 10 minutes to find several issues. This is something so basic that it means nobody even bothers to use WHMCS internally or test it. And when you claim it’s a bug they say it’s a feature. Look how 7.6 was released? That is a release candidate? Seriously WHMCS, wake up and smell the coffee, that is a beta with other companies. Even their own themes are broken and they release that as a RC version.

All softwares have bugs, but serious bugs or even dumb ones which don't pass even basic testing is just lack of attention or dedication. I can understand this from a one person company or as hobby, but WHMCS is supposed to be a company with more than one person behind. This speaks management issues.

The way they approach development is also 360 degrees opposite to others software companies. I recently reported 2 bugs to another software company I use, and they fixed them in 3 days, giving me a new build. Their reply when I reported the bug was:

If it's changed behavior (and I have replicated it), then it's considered a bug so I have submitted it as one. 🙂

They even follow up to see if it was fixed. Big difference with WHMCS’s approach.

I get that WHMCS is overloaded with work but if that is the case, why create something like the market store that creates even more support ticket and requires even more staff? Being a service company requires HUGE amounts of customer support and staff vs just developing software and just taking care of the bugs and development. WHMCS is trying to provide services directly now and this is just asking for more troubles when those people clearly come to WHMCS when something happens with the service. They are the ones selling it so they have to respond for those services. Not different from being a Reseller that has to support its own customers.

And about those remote services features. If you are building things based on remote services you don’t control, lets for example name Slack, the company will be sold eventually or something will change. This can happen tomorrow or in 3 years (like it always does). Then your features don't work anymore and you need to replace them or find an alternative to angry customers. It happens all the time, even with Google now restricting the Maps API rate and people moving to Openmaps. This sort of stuff should usually be left as last option if you have developing time left or leave it to external developers build them as extra module. Why are those things even the marketstore store part of the core is beyond me. Not to mention this is also pissing on their customers that use WHMCS to sell the same. How would you feel if you are a web site builder using WHMCS or a spam filter company? Now WHMCS gives your competition a special place inside your software. Insulting to their own customers that are service providers.

Example was the mobile thing. Instead of building push into their own mobile apps, you need to use a third party service. WHMCS is building the software more and more on top of remote things and this is concerning, not only for privacy, security but even performance. I don’t want a front gate GUI to manage remote services from other companies. I want data to be local and work on my server. Otherwise why even use WHMCS… They are so hard trying to turn it into a remote service company (the lease change, and now the market store) that its becoming an horrible monster that is not true to its core when they started out.

Does WHMCS want a cut from my customers? Maybe they want to take my customers away which costed me a fortune to acquire...I don't know, but the market store is seriously an aggressive move as a company that has service providers as customers. I remember when cPanel tried this they received a huge back slash from their customers leaving. Today, cPanel removed all affiliate/third party services stuff on their control panel and only develop local things. They should focus on building in-house local features first, not just things that rely on third party services. The market store is one of the reasons I'm considering leaving WHMCS. Not because of the software, but because of the vision the company has towards the market. We are not their customers anymore. Our customers are. At least this is how I feel. That they are trying to use their software as a gateway towards providing services directly to your customers and maybe even jump over your head in the future. This is all pure speculation and I could be completely mistaken but this is what the market store does. They get a cut from your customers which you are giving them away for free. And they give special preferences to those partners selling on WHMCS over their own customers that sell similar products.

I recently asked someone that was using WHMCS in the past, they are a major cloud brand, and for my surprise they moved to that other competition (which I cannot even name here, childish from WHMCS trying to pretend competition does not exist) and is happy, no issues. I can understand why people that grow a brand switch. Waiting a year to have a bug fixed which I can fix in 1 hour is not acceptable. Not to mention the many things you cannot change. Going to the other competition is like a dream for developers after using WHMCS. It has none of the fancy WHMCS features but that is the difference. You can build them. With WHMCS? You can't. Only WHMCS can. Hooks and API are not a replacement to editing code.

When I mentioned open code before I did not said open source. I’m 100% with a proprietary license and that WHMCS should protect its software. This is not the issue. Plenty of companies sell software that is open and the software is not free and neither open source. Plenty of ones I also pay which are open and I still pay them yearly or with upgrades. They are far more successful in terms of renueve than WHMCS. If you are trying to attract business users, they will just not buy encoded software anymore. This is a thing they learned because their own developers advise against it. Having some parts encoded in the core and for licensing protection is fine. Having almost all the software obfuscated is probably not even in compliance with bigger companies as you have no idea what the software does in the background. Even small developers learned that people are more likely to buy their WHMCS modules if they are not encoded or if they offer both options. Its a trust issue. Why should I trust you to run code in my computer?

What if WHMCS goes belly tomorrow and decides to do something so drastically that your business can't stop operating as normal anymore? Are you seriously putting all your business and revenue on a software that is almost 95% (if not more ...) encoded? If you are a small company maybe. But this is the reason why bigger companies moved out of WHMCS. Its just doing business on a nuke that can go off at any time. Smart people are even running WHMCS in parallel with something else, just in case they have to move in a hurry out. Why did WHMCS removed the list of companies that use their software? I think they advertised some big brands in the past years, and this attracted all the small companies and individuals with more sales as they want to be like those companies. It's just a smart marketing tactic. The reason I suspect is that most of them moved out. I wonder what big brands are using WHMCS today and if they are, did maybe WHMCS give them a special preference by allowing them to have access to all the code? Because I can't believe a major company would do business like this.

I never said everyone should modify WHMCS. But just look how many things WHMCS developers have copied or implemented because someone shared it here on the community or directly with them. They do benefit from someone adding something that makes sense or fixing a bug in the code that is not formatted correctly, or even a typo. They can still approve or deny anything. The problem with WHMCS is that today we are having troubles even modifying things in the WHMCS public website. Why? Because they are encoded. This is seriously bad. Why are some of those files encoded is beyond me. I even once asked them if I could get the files from a module because the API errors they get back and show directly to the customer area cannot be localized and make no sense to customers. They said no.

I said I paid for them before and signed the NDA and they said they don't offer this anymore. My heart sunk that day on how closed and aggressive they are now towards someone that never stole anything from them and always was happy to give them money. I was not sure what I did wrong. They basically refused even when I was going to pay them like many other times. The bugs leads to horrible messages on the customer area which make no sense for them. If I could access the code, I could change them for something more nice, and even something that makes sense in their language. I can’t! And this is affecting customers and business, and is also costing me staff time when they open a ticket. I could go on and on about this, from messages, to links to many other things you cannot change and are giving my customers an horrible experience. And those are visual web things. Something you as the customer should be allowed to change to fix your brand, company or users. I can suffer with WHMCS. But I will not let my customers suffer for mistakes made by others.

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13 hours ago, twhiting9275 said:

I don't disagree here. Make this stuff public so that people can comment on this and hey, instead of having known issues come up over and over again in tickets, well, you can point users there.

Also:
FIX YOUR BUGS!!!

The community hasn't always been here for that, and this should, honestly be separate. I do agree that the WAY that feature requests are implemented needs to be drastically improved, but the current website for it is pretty straightforward. No need to fix anything there.

I've said this for years now. Quit adding 'massive new features'. START patching bugs. Quit denying bugs exist, and start fixing what are known bugs. I reported a bug years back, and they still refuse to acknowledge it as a bug, or fix it (it is a bug).

No, no, no, no, no... For exactly this reason:

Open source software is great, for some things... The problem? If you've got something as big as WHMCS, you cannot have people mucking around and editing things.
People already don't update because it'll break their theme changes... More than you care to know.  
All turning this into an open source mess is going to do? Just increase the number of vulnerable installs out there because people have tweaked their source code and stuff.

 

Yes, yes and yes. sadly, we all know (at least those of us who've been around for a decade or so :)) that this will never ever happen.

 

How about 'never'.  Why? WHMCS staff doesn't care what the users think. More specifically the one person at top doesn't.  We've been shown this time and time again.  That person's opinion is the only one that matters.

 

Again, I wouldn't call the system 'broken', just how it's used.  If those in charge of development paid more attention to what the users wanted (read: the most popular items) and worked towards getting them done, as requested (not like the auto-update failure mess), then this system has a chance. However, again, this isn't something that's going to happen, at all.

Again, I've been saying this for years. It's great that we get so many releases with 'new stuff', but how about fixing stuff, testing stuff thoroughly before releasing it!

There's a reason that people wait until the first release after a major release to update. The major release always, always, always has bugs in it, because it's never thoroughly tested.  

The feature requests requires a separated login. WHMCS’s staff barely participates there and just decline most things or comment on features made 5 years ago?! Some features are also dumb and if you comment on them they remove the comments. Tons of newbies requesting things there that should never make it to WHMCS. The power users that use WHMCS every single day are not there. They are here or are not vocal and read in silent.

You think that is working? Its completely abandoned. Why split your community in two? Those reporting features and others sharing here? Makes no sense.

I don’t think again my comments where confused. Nobody can smuggle anything into WHMCS or add anything to the code if its open. Nothing will change. WHMCS will still make the software and releases. When I say open, I mean let me fire up my IDE and change something if I want. Let me edit the HTML, the JavaScript and the PHP code. They don’t even have to allow anyone to suggest anything either. When I mean open I mean to be able to edit things so I can change them of fix them.

I use tons PHP softwares that are this way and they are sold licenses. And they have no problems selling them either. This would also be magic for third party developers trying to integrate stuff into WHMCS. I'm 100% ok with WHMCS NOT supporting those customers if they made changes. They are on their own. Fine with me. I prefer that over encoded stuff I will never be able to fix or waste my time creating an addon or plugin to fix something that would take 20 minutes otherwise by just changing one single line.

Edited by yggdrasil
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19 hours ago, brian! said:

I wouldn't argue with one word of that...

the stuff about bug tracking is interesting - i've been here too long and have just got used to CORE-xxxxx being top secret for staff eyes only.... but taking a step back and thinking about other software bug tracking, yes it should be more accessible.... I found it far better years ago when submitting bugs was done here in the f0rum - you could actually see where the bugs are, and so try to work around them.... with BT being outside of here, then only the person submitting the bug, and WHMCS, know about it - until the next maintenance release and you can see the changelog... that's no way to do it.... at least using older releases, you know where the bugs are and that no new ones will be added - with latest versions, it's Russian roulette where the bugs are and if you're going to hit one.

feature requests is a joke (and sadly not a funny one) - as you say, why have a nice community hall where we can all gather together, but when we want to make a suggestion, we need to go to the little shed at the bottom of the lane and make a note of it in there... it's ridiculous... you get users making feature requests... that nobody else knows have been created... so they then don't receive many votes... so they don't get implemented by WHMCS... and so the frustration builds....

on so many levels, WHMCS is a company that enjoys to shoot itself in the foot by its own actions.

... and if WHMCS development slowed down any more it would be going backwards - but I know what you meant.... less new features, but get them right before launch.

openness applies to communication too... there's no harm in pre-warning us what's going to be in a beta before the code has been released... there might be a crap idea that we can nip in the bud before any coding time is wasted (e.g removing the domain pricing tables and then having to put them back a year later).... once they've released something as a beta, then it's a hell of a task to get a feature removed before general release... and once released, it's in there and then you're left to the feature request path to get it removed... (or apparently just have a few words with some WHMCS employees!). waiting.gif

it's the general pervasive attitude of only WHMCS knows best that does my head in (e.g let's change how invoices are calculated and not even disucss it first), and the subsequence lack of communication - when was the last time they ever did a full survey of it's userbase and ask them what they want in the future releases (I can't ever recall one).... and i'm not counting the requests system in that, because that's a flawed broken system that needs ditching asap.

v8 should be designed from a blank sheet of paper - because if it's just going to be a slight evolution from v7.6, then they might as well call it v7.7 and we can all go and find something else to use.

The feature requests is indeed a joke. When I commented on someone adding a feature (for something you can already do in WHMCS) my comment gets removed. I basically explain the person how to do what he/she is asking to be a new feature and WHMCS deletes the comment.

I see some people requesting things thinking WHMCS will sell for them. Some make no sense and some are from people clearly not using WHMCS every day.

The reason other companies have bug trackers is to avoid exactly what WHMCS loves so much. Instead of having me opening a ticket for a bug. I could just see the bug tracker and say, “Ah great, they are already aware as someone reported this”. I can then subscribe and be notified if its fixed.

Today? I have to ask them, every time with a ticket or just hunt down the change logs. What a way to make customers waste their time and their own staff that have to keep replying tickets.

And yes, WHMCS does not need to expose the bugs to the public if they don’t want. They can still reject things as well or request more information like with any decent bug tracker.

I understand they probably use an internal bug tracker. Fine. But if they don’t want to open that up. Is it really so hard to integrate the community here with both a bug tracking section and a feature section? We would be able to comment and even fix things or suggest a solution. WHMCS developers would be able to copy the solution and fix things faster. They would also read the feedback on things that are clearly not bugs or should not be feature requests. And sure, they can even implement a voting system as well. But I don’t even agree with a voting system. People use them like Facebook buttons without even reading how a feature request could affect their current workflow.

Things like this should be considered very careful and how they will affect everything else. This is the main reasons why WHMCS is dealing with bugs so much. Someone thinks about a cool idea, and hey lets add it…

They are not paying me or you for our time. Hell, I WOULD pay my users/community for their time because this sort of feedback is invaluable as data and to make improvements. I would love to have vocal customers and I try them to reach out to me for anything, regardless if it’s bad or just to say hello.

Edited by yggdrasil
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1 hour ago, yggdrasil said:

Does WHMCS want a cut from my customers? Maybe they want to take my customers away which costed me a fortune to acquire...I don't know, but the market store is seriously an aggressive move as a company that has service providers as customers. I remember when cPanel tried this they received a huge back slash from their customers leaving. Today, cPanel removed all affiliate/third party services stuff on their control panel and only develop local things.

This.

The time and effort spent to include this (while leaving things like menu edits as hook after hook rather than a simple editor) and not being able to opt entirely out is alarming. I/we should have a say in things like this, and third party add ons was *never* something I wanted. The WHMCS "store" should be an addon, installed only on demand. I"m willing to bet a number of users won't opt in. WHMCS has become bloated, big time, and is starting to feel like a money grab, and a "this is the way it is" sort of application. I stuck with them through the troubles before Cpanel got involved, but of late I've been considering options. I don't want to leave, but things are going in a direction I'm not loving, and are unlikely to change. 

Edited by bear
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2 minutes ago, bear said:

This.

The time and effort spent to include this (while leaving things like menu edits as hook after hook rather than a simple editor) and not being able to opt entirely out is alarming. I/we should have a say in things like this, and third party add ons was *never* something I wanted. The WHMCS "store" should be an addon, installed only on demand. I"m willing to be a number of users won't opt in. WHMCS has become bloated, big time, and is starting to feel like a money grab, and a "this is the way it is" sort of application. I stuck with them through the troubles before Cpanel got involved, but of late I've been considering options. I don't want to leave, but things are going in a direction I'm not loving, and are unlikely to change. 

Makes you wonder why WHMCS is modular for all other vendors/services/API's and they then add something like this, NOT AS a module but on every new installation and forced to everyone. Is that their way to maybe try to push revenue? Sticking it on people's face so maybe they will decide to enable it and sell for WHMCS?!

Someone that relies on a one click plug and play thing for selling something, is probably someone that is not giving it a lot of thought and attention. I don't think those type of customers will bring them the sort of renueve they expect. The big guys will surely not enable this and even if they sell those services from those companies, they probably have a direct arrangement with those companies already so why would they sell trough another middle man that takes a cut is beyond me.

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I would also want to say something for 7.6 release, Font Awesome update was really necessary ? I don't think using old version is a security hole OR buggy. Changed entire system just for icons not a good idea. As i know most of uses are not using WHMCS client area as main website.

I also agree with @yggdrasil about  slow down new feature release and LTS should be long. and Marketplace products should be available as plugins separate from core system.

Edited by ThemeMetro
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@yggdrasil I want to respond you on two things you mentioned.

Relying on external services

I had never ending conversations with my colleague on this point. He's a designer therefore he tends to focus on small details while I focus on the big picture. He hates me when I decide use an external service or library in our projects. It could be simply Font-Awesome for icons or a script that renders graphs like Highcharts. He thinks that we should develop EVERYTHING we need because only in this way you can get exactly the result you were expecting. It's true but there's a thing named reality that can't be ignored. If I have to create everything I need with my own hands the software will be ready in 2030. In the meantime what should I do for living?

This is the reason why almost every software, including WHMCS, must rely on external services and libraries otherwise the software will never be released. Moreover what's the point of reinventing things that already exists? It's just a waste of time.

That said, given that at some point you must rely on external services and libraries, there's one thing that you cannot fail. You have to integrate your software with the external service PERFECTLY. This where in my opinion WHMCS fails too much. There's nothing wrong in using Font-Awesome, Smarty, Lavarel, DataTables, Bootstrap, jQuery, MaxMind, PayPal (...) but things bust work flawlessly and shouldn't cause huge troubles to end-when they update the software. This should also include times when your external-partner is sold or changes plans.

About encoded files 

I'm going to say another unpopular thing but I never had any issue with them in over 10 years of development on WHMCS. There's nothing impossible. Most of times you can achieve all your goals with hooks and APIs. The problem I frequently see is that people are unable to use them creatively. I mean they always expect to find an action hook that is named "YesIAmTheHookYouAreLookingFor".Of course sometimes hooks and APIs are not enough but then you can still play another card. Remove the specific thing you don't like in WHMCS and create your one. For example we all hate WHMCS cart templates and the ordering process but no one is forcing us to use them. That's why I always used my own cart that doesn't give a damn about how WHMCS works.

Trigger warning: obviously this is not something that can be done by everyone. Only developers can play with WHMCS. I know that it sucks but it's the same exact story we have on all systems like Magento, WordPress (high-level website), cPanel and so on. You need developers and money to invest otherwise the only option you have is to stay with the default from of WHMCS.

P.s. I wrote this message from a beach with my girlfriend looking at me from distance. Maybe I should stop. Probably there are a tons of mistakes. 

Edited by Kian
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8 hours ago, yggdrasil said:

Is it really so hard to integrate the community here with both a bug tracking section and a feature section?

Both of these exist, and shouldn't be part of the 'community'. Don't want to use them? Great, but that's not WHMCS' fault. 
I don't disagree that bugs should be opened up a bit more, but you're never going to see that happen. Ever. The lack of communication, as I've explained, comes from the top, and that will never change.

4 hours ago, ThemeMetro said:

Font Awesome update was really necessary ?

While it's a nice update, no, it's not necessary. Then again, updating it should have affected literally nothing. if it affected your third party theme, that's on your developer, not WHMCS

2 hours ago, Kian said:

Most of times you can achieve all your goals with hooks and APIs.

Yup. Pretty much anything you want to do can be done through hooks and APIs. Now, if only WHMCS would properly document those... Then again, they keep on refusing to do that, too.

 

2 hours ago, Kian said:

Only developers can play with WHMCS. 

And this is exactly how it should be. Qualified, educated, skilled individuals only. Want to learn? Great, but, like any other system, you're going to have to experiment FIRST

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Tom, I bought WHMCS so I wouldn't need to learn whatever language they're using *this week* in order to get on with actually using the system for it's intended purpose, which used to be billing and provisioning hosting. Now I'm forced to learn hooks so I can eliminate things I don't want or need, or something as mundane as being able to add in a menu link. This should be simple to do with built in functions rather than having me learn or hire someone to do what should be native to the app, especially when the pace around here to change things is a frequent as it is. 

They need to take notice (and pity) on those of us that don't code PHP for a living, and make things possible for the largest segment of it's customers, rather than having us hire or purchase addons, seeing how often the authors vanish or fail to keep current to the latest greatest WHMCS version. 

"Pretty much anything you want to do can be done through hooks and APIs. Now, if only WHMCS would properly document those.."

Seems even they can't keep up. 😉

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21 hours ago, Kian said:

@yggdrasil I want to respond you on two things you mentioned.

Relying on external services

I had never ending conversations with my colleague on this point. He's a designer therefore he tends to focus on small details while I focus on the big picture. He hates me when I decide use an external service or library in our projects. It could be simply Font-Awesome for icons or a script that renders graphs like Highcharts. He thinks that we should develop EVERYTHING we need because only in this way you can get exactly the result you were expecting. It's true but there's a thing named reality that can't be ignored. If I have to create everything I need with my own hands the software will be ready in 2030. In the meantime what should I do for living?

This is the reason why almost every software, including WHMCS, must rely on external services and libraries otherwise the software will never be released. Moreover what's the point of reinventing things that already exists? It's just a waste of time.

That said, given that at some point you must rely on external services and libraries, there's one thing that you cannot fail. You have to integrate your software with the external service PERFECTLY. This where in my opinion WHMCS fails too much. There's nothing wrong in using Font-Awesome, Smarty, Lavarel, DataTables, Bootstrap, jQuery, MaxMind, PayPal (...) but things bust work flawlessly and shouldn't cause huge troubles to end-when they update the software. This should also include times when your external-partner is sold or changes plans.

About encoded files 

I'm going to say another unpopular thing but I never had any issue with them in over 10 years of development on WHMCS. There's nothing impossible. Most of times you can achieve all your goals with hooks and APIs. The problem I frequently see is that people are unable to use them creatively. I mean they always expect to find an action hook that is named "YesIAmTheHookYouAreLookingFor".Of course sometimes hooks and APIs are not enough but then you can still play another card. Remove the specific thing you don't like in WHMCS and create your one. For example we all hate WHMCS cart templates and the ordering process but no one is forcing us to use them. That's why I always used my own cart that doesn't give a damn about how WHMCS works.

Trigger warning: obviously this is not something that can be done by everyone. Only developers can play with WHMCS. I know that it sucks but it's the same exact story we have on all systems like Magento, WordPress (high-level website), cPanel and so on. You need developers and money to invest otherwise the only option you have is to stay with the default from of WHMCS.

P.s. I wrote this message from a beach with my girlfriend looking at me from distance. Maybe I should stop. Probably there are a tons of mistakes. 

I don’t mean things running on your server. Using external libraries is fine and you would certainly not write your own JavaScript library and just use jQuery. I mean external services that rely on third party services to work like Whois services, Maps, communication, etc. Slack is an example of an external service. I see companies changing all the time, that includes services which are not free anymore, API that now are rate limited or removed...

About changes where you can do anything you want. Sure, you could write a whole PHP wrapper around WHMCS just like you could intercept everything, at this point why even use WHMCS...

I had WHMCS support confirm me things that I cannot change with hooks anymore and I had hooks not working either (reported bugs). That code was there on the templates on past versions. Why should I have to use hooks to modify links and colors or HTML on my side? This is horrible and every developer or web designer will tell you to stay away of something like that. Its not standard code practices. I want pure HTML code, CSS, JS, PHP. WHMCS is taking code out of themes and moving them behind the closed core. I just upgraded to 7.5 and now you cannot even change the SEO url formats anymore like I was able to do in the past by modifying them on template files. They removed this from the templates as well and now the path and routes are behind a closed IonCube files which you cannot change. So what you are saying is not entirely correct. WHMCS is taking control out of your template files and customization to move them into their closed core which only they can see and control. This is something that has me very concerned as I see the changes from version to version. The way to modify and change things is much worse now than in past versions. Every new WHMCS is not an upgrade for developers or designers but a downgrade.

Also, I cannot even tell you how horrible this is for a commercial website. Think really hard if your website scan scale with traffic this way. Do you know what a seriously bad practice this is? Having to render gazillion hooks on every page because those hooks have to output the HTML code !!! Good luck trying to work this out in the future without having huge performance penalties and problems. This is just absolutely a horrible way of creating webpages. Every good web designer or web developer will tell you to stay away from this. You should have access to all the code that is rendered on your public websites, not WHMCS. This is not the core and has nothing to do with licensing. Its your website!

And if WHMCS did this so they can have their own stuff automatically generated on themes, this is just pure laziness on their part because nothing stops WHMCS from shipping more than one theme. They could ship the default with all their horrible hooks and pre-generated code for newbies and ship another advance one for developers that has no hooks and renders all the code and changes on the templates directly. Of course that means supporting 2 themes but there is no reason that someone is limiting them from having just one theme. I can understand they want a simple plug and play system that creates all the proper menus and stuff for newbies and maybe even give them a GUI to change the colors and other stuff. But all this would be ok if the rest was not forced to use that. Give us a clean advanced theme without hooks and closed code !!!

What is next? Not letting us change the colors on CSS anymore because they are also encoded? How about JavaScript? How about HTML code? Ah wait, that is already a reality. You cannot change some HTML code anymore because its encoded now, stuff that was not encoded on previous versions.

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12 hours ago, bear said:

Tom, I bought WHMCS so I wouldn't need to learn whatever language they're using *this week* in order to get on with actually using the system for it's intended purpose, which used to be billing and provisioning hosting. Now I'm forced to learn hooks so I can eliminate things I don't want or need, or something as mundane as being able to add in a menu link. This should be simple to do with built in functions rather than having me learn or hire someone to do what should be native to the app, especially when the pace around here to change things is a frequent as it is. 

They need to take notice (and pity) on those of us that don't code PHP for a living, and make things possible for the largest segment of it's customers, rather than having us hire or purchase addons, seeing how often the authors vanish or fail to keep current to the latest greatest WHMCS version. 

"Pretty much anything you want to do can be done through hooks and APIs. Now, if only WHMCS would properly document those.."

Seems even they can't keep up. 😉

And this is the biggest irony as well. WHMCS is making it much harder for non-developers to customize their sites. People will not use WHMCS if their site looks exactly like all other WHMCS sites. At that point, its an amateurish product. The biggest and best CMS's are so powerful that you don't even know the sites using them. Not even looking the source code on the site because they generate pure standard code without references to anything !!!

It seems WHMCS learned nothing about that, developers want freedom to code their own way, not the way the software imposes it on them. In the past they could edit HTML, or maybe even learn a bit of smarty. Now they must learn PHP to change the look on their websites. They made it impossible for newbies to easily change stuff now which is why you have so many topics here in the community about people asking how to change even the simplest things.

And I 100% agree with you. Why should we learn new ways to modify our own websites. The whole software industry tries to be open and compatible with everything else. WHMCS tries to create a closed system that is so obscure only they understand.

Someone at WHMCS also missed the school course on what hooks are and work with other platforms. Nobody is using hooks to modify visual design elements. Hooks should be used to extend a basic system not for core basic funcionality. Just horrible !!!

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19 hours ago, twhiting9275 said:

Both of these exist, and shouldn't be part of the 'community'. Don't want to use them? Great, but that's not WHMCS' fault. 
I don't disagree that bugs should be opened up a bit more, but you're never going to see that happen. Ever. The lack of communication, as I've explained, comes from the top, and that will never change.

While it's a nice update, no, it's not necessary. Then again, updating it should have affected literally nothing. if it affected your third party theme, that's on your developer, not WHMCS

Yup. Pretty much anything you want to do can be done through hooks and APIs. Now, if only WHMCS would properly document those... Then again, they keep on refusing to do that, too.

 

And this is exactly how it should be. Qualified, educated, skilled individuals only. Want to learn? Great, but, like any other system, you're going to have to experiment FIRST

Tell me how to modify the new routepath, fqdnRoutePath, or WHMCS.utils.getRouteUrl or getLearnMoreRoute or just ANY new route path now.

What you guys are saying is not true. In the past I could change something like this:

<a href="{$WEB_ROOT}/ANYTHING-YOU-WANT-HERE/{$dlcat.id}/{$dlcat.urlfriendlyname}">

Now even the links are hardcoded like this:

{routePath('store-ssl-certificates-ev'}

You see the problem above? The first one is standard HTML with smarty tags. The other is not. And that path is behind IonCube now and generated automatically which you cannot change. Smarty tags are not encoded, the PHP code with WHMCS is.

Ah, well sure. I could just create a new site completely using the API and not using any WHMCS templates (assuming you even have all the API calls, trust me, at one point you will not find something...)

To argue there that you can do anything you want with WHMCS is like claiming you can run Windows software without issues on Linux. Sure you can but its not native !!!

You can create a software that detects the URL or a specific string on WHMCS, then tries to detect this every time a visitors loads the page and replace it. And I would say your site and software is a completely abomination at this point. And no problem crashing your server either since you need to do all the calculations even to render basic HTML output.

Or sure, you could do anything you want with WHMCS as long as you decide to decode the software and break the license but I'm not assuming any of those things here.

Out of the box, you cannot do many things now and its getting worse, not better. Its such a pleasure to code and work on open systems vs having to do anything with WHMCS. That should tell you how bad is is. Any developer or web designer that tells you WHMCS is a great system to build a website is a probably not very good at his job and knows no better than just WHMCS.

Edited by yggdrasil
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On 03/08/2018 at 21:57, twhiting9275 said:

The community hasn't always been here for that, and this should, honestly be separate. I do agree that the WAY that feature requests are implemented needs to be drastically improved, but the current website for it is pretty straightforward. No need to fix anything there.

if the point of feature requests is to give Support an easy out when replying to tickets, then fine leave things as they are... if the whole point of FR is to get them implemented, then bring them where more users will see them.... I could literally create a FR now, but unless I gave you the link, it's unlikely you'd find it in a search in a few days time... if nobody finds it, nobody can vote for it... if it gets a low number of votes, it gives WHMCS the excuse to do nothing about it.

i've seen feature requests completed after 5 years, where I know for a fact that the original posters are no longer even using WHMCS - when features take that long, it's ridiculous.

i'm not necessarily saying make it a separate f0rum, but if we can draw more people to voting on requests, we can then call WHMCS bluff about the number of votes they receive and them doing sweet Football Association about them.... making it in one place makes sense to me... even if using separate systems for each.

at an absolute minimum, there should be a link to the FR site in the Community header menu (there isn't one currently)... and there should be some sort of link (e.g a feed) where new submitted requests can be seen here... I did toy with using a RSS feed to do something myself, but it only contains 3 requests, so it's useless.

On 03/08/2018 at 21:57, twhiting9275 said:

I've said this for years now. Quit adding 'massive new features'. START patching bugs. Quit denying bugs exist, and start fixing what are known bugs. I reported a bug years back, and they still refuse to acknowledge it as a bug, or fix it (it is a bug).

yes - the bugs we all know are there, but get left untouched after every update...

On 03/08/2018 at 21:57, twhiting9275 said:

More specifically the one person at top doesn't.  We've been shown this time and time again.  That person's opinion is the only one that matters.

Tom, I can't tell you how much I agree with you on this.... I actually can't tell you... thankfully the WHMCS staff seem to be completely ignoring the thread and not throwing warning points around willy-nilly..... let's just say that I have never spoken to that person, and that I have no plans to do so.... but yes, if he's signed off on every bugged release in the last three years, then that's a major part of the problem... sadly, future releases are not therefore going to be any different.

On 03/08/2018 at 21:57, twhiting9275 said:

Again, I wouldn't call the system 'broken', just how it's used.  If those in charge of development paid more attention to what the users wanted (read: the most popular items) and worked towards getting them done, as requested (not like the auto-update failure mess), then this system has a chance. However, again, this isn't something that's going to happen, at all.

I think we're basically agreeing, but trying to fix the same thing from different angles. 😀

On 03/08/2018 at 21:57, twhiting9275 said:

There's a reason that people wait until the first release after a major release to update. The major release always, always, always has bugs in it, because it's never thoroughly tested.  

what's that definition of insanity phrase.. 🙄 it's the same people in charge all the time repeating the same mistakes... one-off's are forgivable, but when you can clearly see a pattern, and can easily predict it, then it's so frustrating... as you say, nothing will get done, because those involved will keep their heads down and not take any responsibility publicly... i'm not even sure if they would take it privately either.

On 04/08/2018 at 10:58, yggdrasil said:

Big difference with WHMCS’s approach.

ultimately, it might need a cull of senior staff to fix this - but turkeys don't vote for Christmas, so that ain't going to happen... i've got the seat next to Tom on the Pessimism Express, calling at all stations to Milton Keynes.

On 04/08/2018 at 11:09, yggdrasil said:

The feature requests requires a separated login. WHMCS’s staff barely participates there and just decline most things or comment on features made 5 years ago?! Some features are also dumb and if you comment on them they remove the comments. Tons of newbies requesting things there that should never make it to WHMCS. The power users that use WHMCS every single day are not there. They are here or are not vocal and read in silent.

most experienced WHMCS users will know that if you want anything doing, within a reasonable time-frame, a feature request is not the way to go.... newbie users might go in the naive hope that the system works... time will teach them that it doesn't.

On 04/08/2018 at 11:09, yggdrasil said:

You think that is working? Its completely abandoned. Why split your community in two? Those reporting features and others sharing here? Makes no sense.

I can't believe more people go to FR than here... now forget the fake stats about there being 75,000 members here (that's just 75,000 accounts created since x years ago)... actual active numbers must be high hundreds tops - so it's not a big community...

On 04/08/2018 at 11:22, yggdrasil said:

The reason other companies have bug trackers is to avoid exactly what WHMCS loves so much. Instead of having me opening a ticket for a bug. I could just see the bug tracker and say, “Ah great, they are already aware as someone reported this”. I can then subscribe and be notified if its fixed.

the way they publicise hotfixes is weird... no doubt if you have a valid open ticket, or subscribe to the appropriate community, you will be informed... but anyone installing v7.6 today won't have a clue there are hotfixes.... if the damn hotfix pages had RSS feeds, i can write an admin widget to tell users which hotfixes are available for their installed version (the widget itself was written last year, works - just needs the rss feeds!)... i've been waiting on Chris for over a year on this (not necessarily his fault - just how WHMCS works internally)... bloody frustrating when it's a trivial thing to setup... mind you, i'd then be reliant on the support staff putting the hotfixes in the appropriate category (which they don't always do!).

what would make more sense, would be to make each necessary hotfix (not the optional ones) a .0.x release and let the auto-updater pick up their release (not that i'm a fan of the auto-updater).

On 04/08/2018 at 11:22, yggdrasil said:

This is the main reasons why WHMCS is dealing with bugs so much. Someone thinks about a cool idea, and hey lets add it… 

... but let's not add it properly, let's only develop things so far and then move onto some other new feature.... let's launch MarketConnect, but not make it in the slightest bit multilingual (because we really value our international customers)... 15 months later, now we're ready to make it multilingual - but only the promo banners (though we won't release the relevant documentation on how to modify them yet), and we've edited one of the templates to make it multilingual (but it still isn't fully multilingual).. i'm sure we're get around to making the other templates multilingual at some future point... welcome to using WHMCS. 😮

On 04/08/2018 at 14:50, ThemeMetro said:

I would also want to say something for 7.6 release, Font Awesome update was really necessary ?

i'd agree, it could have waited until v8.

22 hours ago, Kian said:

Trigger warning: obviously this is not something that can be done by everyone. Only developers can play with WHMCS. I know that it sucks but it's the same exact story we have on all systems like Magento, WordPress (high-level website), cPanel and so on. You need developers and money to invest otherwise the only option you have is to stay with the default from of WHMCS.

19 hours ago, twhiting9275 said:

And this is exactly how it should be. Qualified, educated, skilled individuals only. Want to learn? Great, but, like any other system, you're going to have to experiment FIRST

on any of those other systems, do you need a developer, or third-party app, just to edit a menu - I don't think so.

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On 8/4/2018 at 11:55 AM, Kian said:

I know that it sucks but it's the same exact story we have on all systems like Magento, WordPress (high-level website), cPanel and so on. You need developers and money to invest otherwise the only option you have is to stay with the default from of WHMCS.

Well that is a bad comparison isn't it?

I don't have a problem with having a developer to modify things with cPanel, or Magento, or WordPress. Fine. Perfectly acceptable, but this is not a fair example at all. Your developer CAN'T modify WHMCS because its encoded. My developer can modify Magento, WordPress or cPanel, those are not encoded. Why do you think cPanel has a bigger market over Plesk which also encode its PHP files? I wonder why....

Even if you have developers for WHMCS, they can't do anything regarding some stuff inside WHMCS except pray the developers will fix a bug, document something or decide to be so kind and give you access to the code in a non encoded file. IonCube is more or less an aberration today with most software companies, and only used by small developers and tiny companies trying protect their code. Even those that use it, use it correctly, and don't just encode everything like WHMCS does which is getting trigger happy with IonCube.

IonCube is a good tool if you are responsible enough and design your software in a very careful way not to encode things you should not be encoding. WHMCS competition that does it, is even proud to say they only encode 3 files regarding the license and advertise their software as open code base which is different than open source which nobody is asking for. That is what good design and responsible IonCube is. Its not even protection either but just obfuscation and it's a lousy way to do business. If you cannot trust your customers, maybe you are in the wrong industry. We are not pirating their software. And pirates have no problem decoding WHMCS because Ioncube is just that, obfuscation. This kind of ironic. Script kiddies pirates have a better WHMCS experience than we the paying customers have.

We would not have this discussion if it was open code base. WHMCS staff could tell me to piss off and just hire a developer if I want something changed, removed, documented or implemented that is currently not in the product. We could fix bugs on our own instead of waiting for them. Add features or remove them...

Want something back? Merge the old code. Want something gone? Remove it. Want something new? Add it. That bug is killing your business? Fix it. All which can't be done today.

Edited by yggdrasil
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6 hours ago, yggdrasil said:

About changes where you can do anything you want. Sure, you could write a whole PHP wrapper around WHMCS just like you could intercept everything, at this point why even use WHMCS...

I perfectly understand this statement. Why investing time perfecting a software instead of creating your own one? Both activities require a lot of time but let's not exaggerate. There's an huge difference between perfecting an existing software and creating a new one. And I'm speaking about time, money and people involved. I do understand that it's just a provocation but we're on two different levels.

6 hours ago, yggdrasil said:

Why should I have to use hooks to modify links and colors or HTML on my side? This is horrible and every developer or web designer will tell you to stay away of something like that. Its not standard code practices.

I agree but like I said before no one is forcing us to use their hooks for simple things like sidebars and navbar. Let me be totally clear. I understand why they decided to use this approach but it doesn't change the fact that I'm disgusted by the whole concept of dealing with messy hooks/classes just to perform simple tasks on sidebars and navbar. I hate it so much that I've always refused to use them on my website. I have my own toolbar with HTML, CSS and js fully accessible without crazy classes inside hook points. Most important it doesn't stop working when I upgrade WHMCS. It's pure joy and freedom and frankly I don't get why so many people keep relying on standard WHMCS for these things.

6 hours ago, yggdrasil said:

Do you know what a seriously bad practice this is? Having to render gazillion hooks on every page because those hooks have to output the HTML code !!! Good luck trying to work this out in the future without having huge performance penalties and problems. This is just absolutely a horrible way of creating webpages. Every good web designer or web developer will tell you to stay away from this. You should have access to all the code that is rendered on your public websites, not WHMCS. This is not the core and has nothing to do with licensing. Its your website!

Well Prestashop uses the same approach. It has hundreds of hook points that work in the same way of the ones of WHMCS. Magento is even more complicated. All these platforms use a lot of resources, are complicated and require skills. From the point of view of a small business they are nightmares but for medium/big companies they're the way to go. These platforms are not meant to be easy to use, light and plug and play. I mean WHMCS is used by IT professionals (system engineers, developers, designers, providers, web agencies). I think that they all have to deal with problems way bigger than navbar and sidebars. If they're unable to deal with such relatively simple problems (learing hooks or creating their own navbar and sidebar) I really don't get how they can run their business. I don't want to sound offensive. I simply don't get it.

6 hours ago, yggdrasil said:

Give us a clean advanced theme without hooks and closed code !!!

You can rid of the default template of WHMCS and make you own system. Then you can even make it customizable on the fly like this or this to change colors of your theme on the fly and add/remove links in your footer. I'm not saying that it's super-easy but damn it's possible, perfectly stable and reilabe.

3 hours ago, yggdrasil said:

Your developer CAN'T modify WHMCS because its encoded. My developer can modify Magento, WordPress or cPanel, those are not encoded. Why do you think cPanel has a bigger market over Plesk which also encode its PHP files? I wonder why....

Even if you have developers for WHMCS, they can't do anything regarding some stuff inside WHMCS except pray the developers will fix a bug, document something or decide to be so kind and give you access to the code in a non encoded file. IonCube is more or less an aberration today with most software companies, and only used by small developers and tiny companies trying protect their code. Even those that use it, use it correctly, and don't just encode everything like WHMCS does which is getting trigger happy with IonCube.

Frankly I don't get what is wrong with encoded files. I don't want to repeat myself but in 10 years of WHMCS I never had to say "Oh damn, I can't do it because this file is encoded". The fact that files all php files are encoded has never been a problem.

4 hours ago, brian! said:

on any of those other systems, do you need a developer, or third-party app, just to edit a menu - I don't think so.

Let's let's be honest 😀 You need a priest and a developer to add a menu in Magento and a psychologist to import your Catalog. Magento has been crafted by devils in hell. It's more than 4 years that I no longer use it so maybe now it's more friendly but I really don't think so.

Edited by Kian
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1 hour ago, Kian said:

Then you can even make it customizable on the fly like this or this to change colors of your theme on the fly and add/remove links in your footer. I'm not saying that it's super-easy but damn it's possible, perfectly stable and reilabe.

Neither loads for me. Ironic.

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I don't know how to link images with URLs instead of showing them in the post 🙄

Now they should be visible here (changes you see in the preview are automatically applied in front-end on my template) and here (footer menus/links managed from an interface in multi-language). This is just a small portion from which you can see how I don't give a damn about WHMCS templates and their messy structure. Like Frankie said I did it my way.

No one is forcing us to use all components of WHMCS.

Edited by Kian
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3 hours ago, Kian said:

I perfectly understand this statement. Why investing time perfecting a software instead of creating your own one? Both activities require a lot of time but let's not exaggerate. There's an huge difference between perfecting an existing software and creating a new one. And I'm speaking about time, money and people involved. I do understand that it's just a provocation but we're on two different levels.

I'm not. We are all of course here using WHMCS because we don't want to create something from scratch, but there is no reason why we should not be able to fully develop on top of it and extend it, customize our sites the way we want or even the level of integration WHMCS has with a business. WHMCS should adapt to the way you do business, not the other way around. Since every business is different, the only way to achieve this is letting us a high level of customization and granularity when it comes to changes. Not forcing us to do it their way. The key here is options and more freedom.

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I agree but like I said before no one is forcing us to use their hooks for simple things like sidebars and navbar. Let me be totally clear. I understand why they decided to use this approach but it doesn't change the fact that I'm disgusted by the whole concept of dealing with messy hooks/classes just to perform simple tasks on sidebars and navbar. I hate it so much that I've always refused to use them on my website. I have my own toolbar with HTML, CSS and js fully accessible without crazy classes inside hook points. Most important it doesn't stop working when I upgrade WHMCS. It's pure joy and freedom and frankly I don't get why so many people keep relying on standard WHMCS for these things.

That is not really the same. If you are creating a main menu for your site, sure, that is fine and most probably don't use the ones WHMCS is providing but the sidebar and internal menus change depending on the product type or even product state. Example of that are domains, the left menu actions are disabled if the domain is expired. Those links also change based on the domain ID, the same is true for products and some things need to change dynamically on the links and text. Fixed static HTML is not really a proper solution. The reason why most still are using those approaches is because this is what was there in old templates. Yes, you could create most of those things with PHP calling directly to the database but then we are going back to your point of recreating stuff. If we need to recreate things then why even bother using WHMCS. The idea of using WHMCS is to make your work easier, not harder. If I'm going to create menus and links by creating my own interface and talking to the database directly, at this point I don't need any of the WHMCS themes and templates anymore. Why even bother with using WHMCS as a front end then...

Quote

Well Prestashop uses the same approach. It has hundreds of hook points that work in the same way of the ones of WHMCS. Magento is even more complicated. All these platforms use a lot of resources, are complicated and require skills. From the point of view of a small business they are nightmares but for medium/big companies they're the way to go. These platforms are not meant to be easy to use, light and plug and play. I mean WHMCS is used by IT professionals (system engineers, developers, designers, providers, web agencies). I think that they all have to deal with problems way bigger than navbar and sidebars. If they're unable to deal with such relatively simple problems (learing hooks or creating their own navbar and sidebar) I really don't get how they can run their business. I don't want to sound offensive. I simply don't get it.

Again those softwares are not encoded. What if a hook is not working with your WHMCS template? Yes, there are bugs in which a hook does nothing with WHMCS or if you combine it with another hook it never triggers. What if its not doing what you think it should do, you can't look what is wrong in the code either.  Again, if you are going to generate your whole site by creating hooks, I'm sorry but you are doing it wrong. And PrestaShop and Magento since you like to talk about them are absolutely a disaster in performance. There are even special hosting services for them because they just perform badly and are resource hungry vs tons of other CMS and site platforms. They are not exactly what I call "great" in terms of speed and performance.

Quote

You can rid of the default template of WHMCS and make you own system. Then you can even make it customizable on the fly like this or this to change colors of your theme on the fly and add/remove links in your footer. I'm not saying that it's super-easy but damn it's possible, perfectly stable and reilabe.

Frankly I don't get what is wrong with encoded files. I don't want to repeat myself but in 10 years of WHMCS I never had to say "Oh damn, I can't do it because this file is encoded". The fact that files all php files are encoded has never been a problem.

Let's let's be honest 😀 You need a priest and a developer to add a menu in Magento and a psychologist to import your Catalog. Magento has been crafted by devils in hell. It's more than 4 years that I no longer use it so maybe now it's more friendly but I really don't think so.

I don't mind complexity. I'm not afraid of that. I'm ok if there is no way around. But creating artificial complexity just because is different. WHMCS could just not encode those things and let us deal with the complex side. Instead they are putting some stuff here, another there, something else here and then on each upgrade moving them around again. Then they encode them and decided to lock you out. If you think I didn't consider making my own GUI over the database of WHMCS I did. I think I even made a post last year. But if I'm doing this, then all I'm using at that point is the admin side and back end for automation. And then why not remove that as well? Since you did half the work already, then its just another natural step to implement your own back end for the database. At this point if you don't realize it already, you created your custom in-house solution. You don't need WHMCS anymore. Why bother if you are reading and saving data directly to the database without WHMCS...

I suspect this is not what I and most people here want. We don't want to re-create a full in house solution. We want to use WHMCS and the features it has. Coding all that from scratch is expensive, both in time and resources. Why pay WHMCS to use their software if that is what we are supposed to do (develop our own front end GUI). I think we all agree we want to use WHMCS as the base for everything and build on top.

Edited by yggdrasil
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1 hour ago, Kian said:

I don't know how to link images with URLs instead of showing them in the post 🙄

Now they should be visible here (changes you see in the preview are automatically applied in front-end on my template) and here (footer menus/links managed from an interface in multi-language). This is just a small portion from which you can see how I don't give a damn about WHMCS templates and their messy structure. Like Frankie said I did it my way.

No one is forcing us to use all components of WHMCS.

Upload to Imgur and then paste the link here. It works automatically it seems 😁

That, what you linked is EXACTLY WHAT I DON'T WANT. Its is super cool for a newbie trying to change colors. I don't want to use your GUI to change CSS colors on my site. It can be limiting or its just forcing me to do it your boxed way. I want to fire my code editor and change CSS like I do for the rest of my site, software and platforms. If you need to change every page like this, it would be a nightmare when I can just fire my IDE and search and replace or edit dozens of pages at the same time and have them uploaded to my test server and subversion automatically.

This is exactly what I don't want WHMCS doing and forcing us to use in some future. Let developers do modules for that and sell them. I don't want to go to the admin side and have those things generated as hook on my templates. I want to edit the code directly on my template files like any other regular website, HTML file or even CMS software. Just give us pure coding. Not that I disagree with what you did, but why not have both options? Why can't WHMCS have that for newbies and then also have an advanced theme where all the code is editable for developers? One could be the default that is generated fully with hooks, the other one the advanced does not have hooks, and the code is directly rendered inside, including PHP, smarty and everything else required.

Edited by yggdrasil
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1 hour ago, yggdrasil said:

I want to edit the code directly on my template files like any other regular website, HTML file or even CMS software. Just give us pure coding. Not that I disagree with what you did, but why not have both options?

Why don't you think that we already have both options? What you see in the gif I posted was just the icing on the cake. In order to develop that little "toy" I had to code my own box to fire my code. All parts of the template are fully accessible. I'm not using any hook to inject my stuff. It's just a regular website.

I could give you another example. A session-based multi-language website like WHMCS is garbage from SEO perspective. Many of us invest enormous amount of time to improve the quality of translations but Spiders/Crawlers don't use sessions. That means that translating WHMCS in multiple languages gives you no benefit on search engines as your website is indexed only in default language. But there's more. Many also use GeoIP services to automatically set the language of WHMCS based on visitors' location (French for Frenchs, German for Germans, Italian for Italians...) but then Google gives you penalties for duplicate content since the same exact URL is accessible from multiple languages.

I know how terrible is the session-based system of WHMCS from the 1st day I started to use this software. That's why I have never used it on my websites. I simply use multiple domains (example.it for Italian, example.com for English, example.de for German etc.) like Google and all other Search Engines want.

I can give you hundreds of different examples where I decided to get rid of specific features of WHMCS implementing my own ones. While doing it I never had any issue with encoded files, the lack of hook points and API calls and most important I never had to use all that crazy classes they gave us like Capsule...

Capsule::table->what('the', 'hell', 'is')->that('are you')['kidding']->me 🤮

Come on WHMCS! 🤪 I know how to query the database. I refuse to learn a more complicated way get the job done. I use PDO and I don't care how WHMCS wants me to query the database. In conclusion, like I said multiple times already, no one is forcing us to use and rely on WHMCS features and components we don't like.

Edited by Kian
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