Wish List for WHMCS v8

[yggdrasil]

43 minutes ago, Kian said:

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.

Just taking your example above let me tell you how I did it. I don't use sessions for languages unless I switch the user automatically or the user did so by selecting it. Each URL is language based, so its on its own language with no duplicates for search engines either.

Example:

This is how an English news announcements URL looks:

whmcs/news/welcome-to-our-site

The same article, in Italian would be:

whmcs/notizie/benvenuti-nel-nostro-sito

That is just an example assuming you are Italian as I don't speak it ☺️. But my point is that BOTH URL's point to the same WHMCS news article but they don't share the same URL. I even replaced the announcement path here with its correct language.

And here comes the thing. When you access notizie/benvenuti-nel-nostro-sito I trigger the lang=it on the server, so that URL will always be displayed in Italian. This is invisible to the user.

If you fire the first one it will be English. The lang session is automatically switched on the Apache server while the user only gets the nice URL displayed.

Assuming you don't know the users language, I try to detect the browser language variable as opposed to GEOIP which you are using and if I can't just default to English. Why the browser one? Because the GEOIP is a very bad parameter for this prompt to failures as IP blocks can be moved around the globe and don't really say what language someone speaks as someone speaking English living abroad would have his operating system and browser set in English.

Something like this requires several changes on WHMCS templates URL's, new lang variables and sure, they also use hooks to replace links like announcements to news and or notizie if Italian was selected + .htaccess rules that are customized. Something like this was possible in v5, v6 quite easily. On v7 I already had to make PHP hooks to implement them and now with 7.5 its even harder as the routepath and other stuff that creates the URL friendly url's are not accesible and encoded. This is just 1 example of the things that are now much harder to do and someday will be impossible unless you completely rewrite the front end. In the past this was dumb easy by just editing the templates. Now WHMCS removed the SEO friendly urls from templates and moved them behind the closed core. When I mean that I'm referring to the code that generates the URL's output format. Result? I will have to create a new hook that detects this and fixes them to the old behavior. And they also now add for example .html to the end, something they didn't before. If do this in the code I could just delete 5 characters .html and it would work nicely on the whole site. Since its encoded I have to create a new hook and server rule that detects .html and strips those away. This is just stupidity.

Why should I be coding to remove things like this...? If I could see the code, I go there and see "Ah, here is how WHMCS rewrites the URL's, I don't want .html in the back, let me remove that." But you can't. The code is somewhere hidden and encoded. So now you have to do this on the output and have every single page rendered this way, then your code that detects this and replaces it and finally the web server that internally redirects the user correctly. All this server overhead and computing for something this simple because like I said, you cannot just fix the original code. Fast and clean should rule over slow and complex.

And can you think about someone that is new to WHMCS and has no idea about PHP, or Apache rules, or how to create hooks? That person is now totally lost if he tries to make something like this. If this was not so, someone in the community could tell him "Go to the file called example.php, and replace line 44 for this..." Even a newbie could make a change.

And lets not discuss the customer themes for a minute. What about bugs in the automation side? What about something in the admin side not working? Some bugs are really incredible simple to fix but it takes weeks or months because WHMCS may or may not fix them in the next release. I have waited for very simple things I could fix in one hour to be fixed in 15 months. Because my bug was not important to them.

As a final note, did you see what you wrote? You said you got rid of specific features of WHMCS and implemented your own. Why? This is why. Because you want control over the functions. This is what is wrong with WHMCS. You, I and everyone else should not be forced to get rid of their method and recreate the same code. You should be using the ones they build, but you did that for reasons that most likely are related to the point that you can customize your functions but can't the ones from WHMCS because they come from an encoded file. At this point what you are doing is just coding the things that are encoded in a way you can manipulate them vs having access to the original code.

Then you also said you should not be doing the DB queries with their capsule method, while that actually has a reason (it makes the proper sanitation of the queries I think in Laravel) your point is the same. You don't want to do it their way but the normal way. There is a big backslash from developers against PHP frameworks for similar reasons. They force you into a specific method...and there is a big tendency now to use pure PHP again or create your own classes and framework (which is what big sites do) vs using one that teaches and enforces their method.

I understand you are happy with how your changes worked so far with WHMCS, until one day you find out you are wasting a huge amount of time to do things which are so simple in other systems that you will start to hate coding for WHMCS when you realize you are just re-doing work someone already did for you. If I need to recreate something in WHMCS because I can't access the original PHP function, we have a problem.

I mentioned another example of module messages. Some API errors are raw and they show like that to the customer. This is just laziness. Again, all modules are encoded, so you cannot improve them, translate them or even fix them. So what is your solution? Not using the WHMCS module and create your own from scratch or have it build by a developer. Again, why bother with WHMCS now if we are just recreating things over and over again and using less and less the original code from WHMCS.

[Kian]

13 hours ago, yggdrasil said:

whmcs/news/welcome-to-our-site

The same article, in Italian would be:

whmcs/notizie/benvenuti-nel-nostro-sito

Be careful 😛 In Italian I prefer to use "news". What if the title of the article is for example the model of CPU? You end up with this:

• whmcs/news/i5-760 (English)
• whmcs/news/i5-760 (Italian)

It would be duplicate content. I know that this example is a bit extreme but in order to avoid any issue I use geographical domains so that:

• example.com/whmcs/news/i5-760 (English)
• example.it/whmcs/news/i5-760 (Italian)

Or alternatively aliases (it.example.com, en.example.com) or paths (/it, /en). Anyway back on topic...

13 hours ago, yggdrasil said:

Something like this requires several changes on WHMCS templates URL's, new lang variables and sure, they also use hooks to replace links like announcements to news and or notizie if Italian was selected + .htaccess rules that are customized. Something like this was possible in v5, v6 quite easily. On v7 I already had to make PHP hooks to implement them and now with 7.5 its even harder as the routepath and other stuff that creates the URL friendly url's are not accesible and encoded.

Yup, it's frustrating and tedious. Luckily I realized that WHMCS was going to make a mess with URLs when I was using v5. I never had to deal with {$WEB_ROOT}, route paths and their automatically generated .htaccess. Once again I created my own system dropping their one even before it was released. Speaking in general, I think that things like templates, htaccess and invoicing rules are very intimate and personal things like my pants 😄 That's why I consider many features of WHMCS just as an advice. I do not expect to use WHMCS provided "as is".

Don't get me wrong. I'm not trying to defend WHMCS, show off my abilities or compare mine with yours. What I am trying to say with all my examples is that I managed to achieve all my goals. I never had to give up on anything. The fact that all WHMCS is encoded has never been an issue. Personally I think that all these constructive feedback including yours will never change anything. This community is full of them. In WHMCS they have their plans written in stone. Obviously the first victims of their plans are small businesses that have no skills and cannot afford developers.

13 hours ago, yggdrasil said:

And can you think about someone that is new to WHMCS and has no idea about PHP, or Apache rules, or how to create hooks? That person is now totally lost if he tries to make something like this. If this was not so, someone in the community could tell him "Go to the file called example.php, and replace line 44 for this..." Even a newbie could make a change. 

In my opinion this kind of customers no longer are the target of WHMCS. They clearly want to work with developers and for big companies (they earn money based on how many clients you have). Let me repeat myself. Newbies editing php files is pure hell. Just think about what a newbie can make in an open source file. Hundreds of ticket where WHMCS staff have to debug horrific changes and eventually teach newbies the basics of programming.

Lot of years ago I released some modules of mine with code fully accessible. I wanted to punch myself in the balls for making this stupid decision. Spending weeks trying to understand why something isn't working. One day you notice in over 10k+ lines of code that and if statement was changed for a reason like this «I've seen a typo in $a !== $b and I fixed it with $a != $b» Thank you man!

13 hours ago, yggdrasil said:

I understand you are happy with how your changes worked so far with WHMCS, until one day you find out you are wasting a huge amount of time to do things which are so simple in other systems that you will start to hate coding for WHMCS when you realize you are just re-doing work someone already did for you. If I need to recreate something in WHMCS because I can't access the original PHP function, we have a problem. 

You got my attention. Probably I get used to accept all these limitations to the point that I no longer consider them bad since I learnt to adapt. Yes, it would be easier also because sometimes reinventing the wheel seems to be my daily activity. Ideally there should be "core" and "local" PHP scripts. WHMCS should deeply change software architecture to support this kind of change. It's something huge. Considering that the structure of WHMCS more or less is the same since... v4? ... it's not something that I expect to happen. Anyway yes, it would be nice but newbies using it are scary. I don't know... maybe I've changed my mind (a bit).

Edited August 6, 2018 by Kian

[brian!]

53 minutes ago, Kian said:

Personally I think that all these constructive feedback including yours will never change anything. This community is full of them. In WHMCS they have their plans written in stone.

sadly that's true - there is an element of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic about this thread... we're all rightly venting, but at the end of the day, it's not going to make the slightest bit of difference unless WHMCS decide otherwise.

I don't particularly want an open source version, but if they aren't going to produce proper documentation, then let's at least see the source code (if only for reference) - because the days when i'm going to waste my time, trying to figure out how a new WHMCS feature works, with no/insufficient documentation provided, are long gone...

[yggdrasil]

21 minutes ago, Kian said:

Be careful 😛 In Italian I prefer to use "news". What if the title of the article is for example the model of CPU? You end up with this:

• whmcs/news/i5-760 (English)
• whmcs/news/i5-760 (Italian)

It would be duplicate content. I know that this example is a bit extreme but in order to avoid any issue I use geographical domains so that:

• example.com/whmcs/news/i5-760 (English)
• example.it/whmcs/news/i5-760 (Italian)

Or alternatively aliases (it.example.com, en.example.com) or paths (/it, /en). Anyway back on topic...

No, it would not, the "news" part on my setup acts exactly like your it.example.com or /it/ part. Since "news" in an English word it triggers the switch to English and since "notizie" is Italian it would switch to Italian.

So going back to your example of the CPU:

whmcs/news/i5-760 = English only and not Italian

Its actually the same as your it.example.com or example.com/it/ except I use the "news" trigger here as the identification. The same is true for articles, help for English or guide for Italian, aide for french... Its not a duplicate. That URL is displayed in English only. If someone switches the language on that page, it goes to the proper language URL. It's the same thing you are doing but I'm switching the WHMCS url's directly instead of using a sub-domain or sub-folder.

21 minutes ago, Kian said:

Yup, it's frustrating and tedious. Luckily I realized that WHMCS was going to make a mess with URLs when I was using v5. I never had to deal with {$WEB_ROOT}, route paths and their automatically generated .htaccess. Once again I created my own system dropping their one even before it was released. Speaking in general, I think that things like templates, htaccess and invoicing rules are very intimate and personal things like my pants 😄 That's why I consider many features of WHMCS just as an advice. I do not expect to use WHMCS provided "as is".

Don't get me wrong. I'm not trying to defend WHMCS, show off my abilities or compare mine with yours. What I am trying to say with all my examples is that I managed to achieve all my goals. I never had to give up on anything. The fact that all WHMCS is encoded has never been an issue. Personally I think that all these constructive feedback including yours will never change anything. This community is full of them. In WHMCS they have their plans written in stone. Obviously the first victims of their plans are small businesses that have no skills and cannot afford developers.

But you did. You gave up on your time and energies which equals to money lost. The one thing we all have limited on this earth, is time. If you wasted even 1 hour doing this because you knew WHMCS would cause you troubles, then you already lost something. You had to rewrite your own custom solution around WHMCS instead of using WHMCS. You did not even modify WHMCS (because you can't change encoded code), you basically wrote your separate solution. This is the issue here. You should not be doing this and nobody should for things that are freely available on every other web software. You are a developer probably, but a lot of WHMCS customers are not and they want to stay focused on their business. If they hire a web developer to change their URL's that person will find out he can't because its encoded and now the person has to hire a PHP coder in order to write a custom solution around this. Something  which in other system the webmaster can change with a few line changes.

21 minutes ago, Kian said:

In my opinion this kind of customers no longer are the target of WHMCS. They clearly want to work with developers and for big companies (they earn money based on how many clients you have). Let me repeat myself. Newbies editing php files is pure hell. Just think about what a newbie can make in an open source file. Hundreds of ticket where WHMCS staff have to debug horrific changes and eventually teach newbies the basics of programming.

Are you sure about this? Look the new features they are releasing. Power users, which include developers complained I think last year in other places that WHMCS is constantly adding features for newbies and not developer or power users. Look at the biggest features in the last 2 years, the market place just one of them. Do you think this is something targeted at developer and power users? Auto updates? Again, developer merge changes and changes and don't use that either. In fact, I think this is against developers because now those that develop modules are left out because WHMCS is trying to integrate services directly instead of letting others build modules. This also makes no sense because they are making WHMCS dumber, not smarter. They are letting you code less by encoding more files and code that developers had access before. I'm disagree with this statement. WHMCS is not doing this for the sake of you or developers. They are trying to make it more like a dumb system where newbies click here and there and have everything working out of the box and trying to avoid anyone from modifying things.

21 minutes ago, Kian said:

Lot of years ago I released some modules of mine with code fully accessible. I wanted to punch myself in the balls for making this stupid decision. Spending weeks trying to understand why something isn't working. One day you notice in over 10k+ lines of code that and if statement was changed for a reason like this «I've seen a typo in $a !== $b and I fixed it with $a != $b» Thank you man!

That is not a problem at all today. You would be using a comparison system or software, or even make a checksum if a customer changed something to a file. It would take a developer seconds to discover a changed line or even 1 single character. Assuming you are saying here a customer of yours changed something. This is absolutely zero problem for most developers, they would detect a changed file or code from the original and spot the issue or just tell the customer they cannot support a changed file. No issues here. If WHMCS is not able to do this, then I will seriously question their capabilities as developers as even very basic IDE's have features like this.

Also, your statement is a bit contradictory here. If you are saying that WHMCS is doing this for developers, but then you are ok with them encoding stuff, don't you realize this creates more troubles for you in the future? You cannot make some very advanced changes to WHMCS and neither can you find out if something is not working. I would argue the opposite. Forcing WHMCS customers to only use some specific hooks or API's is to simplify things. This is to let some basic developers do things but not advanced integrations. The ones that need to heavily integrate WHMCS with expensive custom build systems/sites can't just do this stuff with a few hooks and API's (which may or may not work). You then could argue that those companies should maybe not use WHMCS but this is the problem. WHMCS in the past was used even by big hosting providers. If its only fit for small one night ventures today or very small businesses, then we agree that WHMCS is getting worse over what it powered in the past.

21 minutes ago, Kian said:

You got my attention. Probably I get used to accept all these limitations to the point that I no longer consider them bad since I learnt to adapt. Yes, it would be easier also because sometimes reinventing the wheel seems to be my daily activity. Ideally there should be "core" and "local" PHP scripts. WHMCS should deeply change software architecture to support this kind of change. It's something huge. Considering that the structure of WHMCS more or less is the same since... v4? ... it's not something that I expect to happen. Anyway yes, it would be nice but newbies using it are scary. I don't know... maybe I've changed my mind (a bit).

We all did at some point. But its getting worse and we should accept more and more restrictions. As a developer, you should be the first one to refuse this limitations. I don't think any developers is happy working with IonCube software... Because its hurting you and your business. You will not be able to suggest WHMCS for more serious projects in the future because they will just consider it a toy for simple stores. Or your current customers might have a problem in some future with WHMCS that is stopping them from growing or selling more. Then they will ask you for a solution and you will constantly fight the software instead of just doing what you know best, which is coding and developing.

[yggdrasil]

24 minutes ago, brian! said:

sadly that's true - there is an element of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic about this thread... we're all rightly venting, but at the end of the day, it's not going to make the slightest bit of difference unless WHMCS decide otherwise.

I don't particularly want an open source version, but if they aren't going to produce proper documentation, then let's at least see the source code (if only for reference) - because the days when i'm going to waste my time, trying to figure out how a new WHMCS feature works, with no documentation provided are long gone...

I don't want an open source system either. I want them to make WHMCS more open code base or at least, as minimum revert the things they encoded and put them non encoded again and stop encoding anything related to the user interface in the future. I have no problem with having bugs on the admin area. But on the user client area I don't find this acceptable. Why should I even have names to WHMCS in site source code? This was not true in the past, now they are even hard coding that. Their own branding into your source code. Without my customers I'm nothing and there is no reason why WHMCS should cause them to suffer from GUI issues and other stuff which I cannot fix easily. If they are going to keep this trend to encode everything and every new code feature they release, at least they should NEVER encode anything that is directly an output to the user/customer interface.

Are you sure things will never change Brian? Most business I know rectify once you punish them where it hurts. Money. If people move to a competitor in the future, WHMCS will absolutely be forced to make changes or go out of business. You will be amazed how some people change once they start to suffer financially. They start to question what is happening and some go back to the root of their problems or some business to their core of what made them successful in the past. Sometimes they are able to change on time, sometimes not.

You cannot keep doing business by charging a few bucks unless you have a big amount of customers and in order to attract those numbers you need the bigger brands on board. Look it like cPanel, its cheap but everyone is using it from big companies to startups. Their revenue is based on the numbers, not milking just a few big customers.

This is a very bad business strategy for WHMCS, losing power users. All those new people investigating WHMCS will just say, "Well if X brand is using them, then it works for me as well....". But if they lose those brands, or lost them already, then they will be in trouble.

In order to attract and keep those bigger businesses they need to be more flexible and open to changes. Those business need deeper integrations than just a third party module. I'm surprised by the quality of companies now using the "WHMCS small but growing competitor" and WHMCS has nothing to show. Why? This is what they should be asking. Maybe you are right Brian and WHMCS is not afraid of competitors. This is what kills companies and fast. They start to relax and play it safe.

Edited August 6, 2018 by yggdrasil

[brian!]

55 minutes ago, yggdrasil said:

Are you sure things will never change Brian?

never say never, but they haven't changed in the last 3 years... the same people are still in charge, so I don't expect any of them to have some sort of Damascene conversion and realise the error of their ways... in the short-term, if they all keep their heads down, WHMCS as a company, will trundle along as always with no doubt a nice regular profit...

it would be nice if someone senior woke up, realised that all they were doing is pumping out buggy, bloated crap software, terrible support, no documentation to speak of and decide to do something about it... as Tom said, when you can easily predict that a major release is going to be bugged, and you should wait until the first maintenance update, then why doesn't someone at WHMCS Towers realise that something needs to change.

now I know some WHMCS staff are unhappy about what goes on at WHMCS (they've told me privately), but what can they do ? it's the people above them who make all the decisions, and it's the poor saps on the front-line who have to take the immediate flak for those decisions.

I have to say that if anyone senior at WHMCS is going home at night, proud of what they've produced for the last few years, then they're living in their own deluded world - i'm actually embarrassed on their behalf, even if they aren't themselves.

55 minutes ago, yggdrasil said:

Most business I know rectify once you punish them where it hurts. Money. If people move to a competitor in the future, WHMCS will absolutely be forced to make changes or go out of business. You will be amazed how some people change once they start to suffer financially. They start to question what is happening and some go back to the root of their problems or some business to their core of what made them successful in the past. Sometimes they are able to change on time, sometimes not.

.. and i've seen many users leave WHMCS to go to a competitor, only to come back here a few years later... though I know at least one user closed their account here because they moved to that other software.. and where there's one, there's usually others.

to get back to your question about will things ever change - in the way that I think we want to see it go, with 100% being a certainty, and 0% being no chance.... i'd put odds that it's in single figures... low single figures... aka unlikely.

and for the avoidance of any doubt, this is not about me coming to the rescue and saving WHMCS - they (senior WHMCS management) have personally disrespected me too many times over the last 4 years, for me to even care about the company or wanting to work for them... my unpaid role here (as decided by me, not them) is to help out fellow WHMCS users where I can (when time and my limited knowledge allows) and, if at all possible, do absolutely nothing to help the company.... there can often be conflicts between those two intentions (me being here answering questions being the most obvious one!), but there are plenty of things I could do to help the company, but I simply won't - that's their loss and at least means that I don't have to be an apologist for the software... as some WHMCS staff seem to be. 🙄

[bear]

1 hour ago, brian! said:

and i've seen many users leave WHMCS to go to a competitor, only to come back here a few years later... though I know at least one user closed their account here because they moved to that other software.. and where there's one, there's usually others.

Honestly, if that "other software that can't be named" ever gets their collective heads out of their collective butts, odds are many more would leave if this continues. I know a little too much about the folks involved in that to go there myself (and frankly hate the system), but with a bit more improvement there and more downhill sliding here, things could tip in their favor. 

Web hosts can be convinced to switch, even if painful, when it comes to time spent that doesn't need to be. 

[Kian]

1 hour ago, brian! said:

and for the avoidance of any doubt, this is not about me coming to the rescue and saving WHMCS - they (senior WHMCS management) have personally disrespected me too many times over the last 4 years, for me to even care about the company or wanting to work for them... my unpaid role here (as decided by me, not them) is to help out fellow WHMCS users where I can (when time and my limited knowledge allows) and, if at all possible, do absolutely nothing to help the company.... there can often be conflicts between those two intentions (me being here answering questions being the most obvious one!), but there are plenty of things I could do to help the company, but I simply won't - that's their loss and at least means that I don't have to be an apologist for the software... as some WHMCS staff seem to be. 🙄 

I'd like to hear your professional story someday if possible. I'm not a stalker 😛 I find incredible all your efforts and now that I know that there's something more I'm even more curious. Sadly I'm off topic here so I must stop.

[yggdrasil]

4 hours ago, brian! said:

never say never, but they haven't changed in the last 3 years... the same people are still in charge, so I don't expect any of them to have some sort of Damascene conversion and realise the error of their ways... in the short-term, if they all keep their heads down, WHMCS as a company, will trundle along as always with no doubt a nice regular profit...

it would be nice if someone senior woke up, realised that all they were doing is pumping out buggy, bloated crap software, terrible support, no documentation to speak of and decide to do something about it... as Tom said, when you can easily predict that a major release is going to be bugged, and you should wait until the first maintenance update, then why doesn't someone at WHMCS Towers realise that something needs to change.

now I know some WHMCS staff are unhappy about what goes on at WHMCS (they've told me privately), but what can they do ? it's the people above them who make all the decisions, and it's the poor saps on the front-line who have to take the immediate flak for those decisions.

I have to say that if anyone senior at WHMCS is going home at night, proud of what they've produced for the last few years, then they're living in their own deluded world - i'm actually embarrassed on their behalf, even if they aren't themselves.

.. and i've seen many users leave WHMCS to go to a competitor, only to come back here a few years later... though I know at least one user closed their account here because they moved to that other software.. and where there's one, there's usually others.

to get back to your question about will things ever change - in the way that I think we want to see it go, with 100% being a certainty, and 0% being no chance.... i'd put odds that it's in single figures... low single figures... aka unlikely.

and for the avoidance of any doubt, this is not about me coming to the rescue and saving WHMCS - they (senior WHMCS management) have personally disrespected me too many times over the last 4 years, for me to even care about the company or wanting to work for them... my unpaid role here (as decided by me, not them) is to help out fellow WHMCS users where I can (when time and my limited knowledge allows) and, if at all possible, do absolutely nothing to help the company.... there can often be conflicts between those two intentions (me being here answering questions being the most obvious one!), but there are plenty of things I could do to help the company, but I simply won't - that's their loss and at least means that I don't have to be an apologist for the software... as some WHMCS staff seem to be. 🙄

Did not cPanel purchased a stake in WHMCS? Maybe one day, WHMCS is sold completely and management is fully replaced, assuming this is the root of the problems. At this point I think it is. If WHMCS was my company I would be embarrassed to release things like 7.6 on its current state and would be more open to customers feedback. Someone is approving those releases. They only have 1 job, developing WHMCS and they don’t get even that part right if they are releasing such buggy versions out to the public. Its like maybe the owners are not in love with what they do anymore or don’t like their brand or work. If this is true, they should let it go to someone that will take better care and move into new ventures.

Personally, if I was the owner I would feel very sad to read a topic like this on my community. I consider my customers the only reason to exist. Without them there is no company, no brand, no progress and no future.

Edited August 6, 2018 by yggdrasil

[CodeCo]

I can agree that there are certain parts of WHMCS which are not appealing. I also agree that SEO friendliness in WHMCS is rather awful in terms that the only changed URLs are the announcement URLs, knowledgebase URLs and then a tiny amount of market connect URLs. I think WHMCS could have done a far better job at them and I sure hope that they do for WHMCS v8.

I've gone out and made a whole list of what the URLs should be when "full SEO friendly URLs" is enabled. Added with @Kian's feedback, I feel like SEO friendliness in WHMCS would be far better increased which is important, especially for an online store. https://file.properties/paste/enukocicem

To end my feedback, I finally think that WHMCS should be using a far better admin design out of the box. It's upsetting that V4 is flatter and follows newer design looks than Blend. A complete neatened redesign to be flat and modern is also something that I think should be done and maybe looking into stuff such as Vue, etc.

[mfoland]

How about we take out the need for Smarty on Custom pages? I've been trying to make a module for sale that uses a custom page, and I'd like to encode it..but encoding with IonCube with smarty.. EH... I'm still trying to figure it out.. They should just make some of it open source!

[Kian]

Probably I've already discussed with you about this matter in another thread weeks ago. You're just using the wrong approach. Smarty is not an enemy 😀 and there's no need to mix PHP scripts with tpl files. Creating tons of pages for custom modules is super quick and easy.

Edited September 4, 2018 by Kian

[-M-]

I have two cents to add to this, as I only stumbled upon this community thread today.

Fire everyone in WHMCS (removed - Rule 2.2 community guidelines) and make brian! CEO. He is the best person around.
Support with WHMCS itself (not including brian! here obviously) is pretty bad to mediocre (and then I am still being very optimistic).

One of the many, many, many negative experiences with WHMCS's staff was an issue with the license (monthly lease No Branding) on IPv6.
Apparently the license was given out on IPv4 and we never tested IPv6 (as we didn't have an IPv6 address at our office ISP) on our main website.

Anyways about a year ago we received also an IPv6 connection at the office from ISP (mind you, I am not talking about the server or the server's connection at the datacenter; apparently that's all the same with WHMCS support staff).
When I needed to login into our WHMCS admin interface, I was shown the following message:

The license key has been entered incorrectly
The domain being used to access your install has changed
The IP address your install is located on has changed
The directory you are using has changed

I was like... Well you understand. Then I visited the website and I noticed it was showing "Powered by WHMCompleteSolution" everywhere!
Totally unacceptable as we have been paying for the "monthly lease with No Branding"-license for many years. So in other words; everyone who visited our main website on an IPv6-address was shown this garbage.

Obviously I was furious and created a support ticket and I did some more digging on this subject. Apparently (at that moment) someone already created a request for this 5 years (!) ago: https://requests.whmcs.com/topic/allow-ipv6-and-ipv4-in-licensing-module
Apparently you needed to inform WHMCS about your server is also supporting IPv6, otherwise the license would only be active on either one IPv4 or IPv6, but not both at the same time. Sigh.

It took several tickets for them to "understand" the issue, but still they didn't see any harm in it. Ofcourse it's very professional to show garbage text "Powered by WHMCompleteSolution" everywhere on your website towards your customers. What would customers think? I can only guess, but nothing positive. I wouldn't place an order if messages like that are shown on a website; it would put me off and I wouldn't entrust them with my order to be quite honest. So that message was being displayed for almost 5 years on our website (and ordering system) for anyone who visited the website through an IPv6-connection from his ISP.

I asked WHMCS several times why customers were NOT informed about this (at all). They (again) didn't see harm in it apparently. Sigh.
Apparently they did "understand" one thing as they created a KB article shortly after: https://www.whmcs.com/members/index.php/knowledgebase/303/Can-I-use-WHMCS-in-a-Dual-Stack-IP-Environment.html

But obviously the "damage" was already done and (like always) WHMCS does not care for one bit at all. WHMCS is only here to make money and as much as possible. All staff, in my humble opinion, are completely incompetent and only give useless answers.
As I have mentioned many times before and I will mention it one more time (just because he deserves it) brian!, YES BRIAN! is really the only helpful person (on many, many occasions), which we have dealt with in the 5+ years now, who has always helped us.
In those 5+ years we have filed only 19 support tickets with WHMCS and 99% we received bogus answers and bogus support answers. Their main (returning) "answer", which I received the most times when they couldn't comprehend the issue, was "Sorry, WHMCS does not support that, but you can always make a feature request for it!" for e.g. simple things which should work out of the box; like working VAT (which didn't work correctly back then). Or what about moving the domain check to the last page (for servers, hosting, etc.)? Simple things, which should have been possible from day one.

When a potential customer has to enter a domain name first to view prices, they are most likely to be put off and move to a different provider. Ofcourse we can remove the need for a domain name (unwanted) or create a custom field for it on a later page, but that's not the point. Also modifying this is not possible, because that part is encoded and thus cannot be changed or moved. Sheesh. I think we have lost several potential customers because of this. We even had several complaints about this. And what does WHMCS do about it? Simply nothing. Oh wait, that's not true; as you can create a feature request for it. Sigh. And this is the company which advertises themselves with, and I quote: "We pride ourselves in listening to customers." Biggest joke of all time...

I wouldn't be surprised if my post gets removed by staff as they really cannot take criticism or (real) complaints. It's either that or they will simply ignore the whole story and create a reply which is useless and has nothing to with the experiences / issues we have had in the past and now with WHMCS. Unfortunately there are no real solid alternatives out there. Otherwise we would have moved away a very long time ago. It's not a healthy way to treat customers with incompetence and treat them like complete idiots.

Luckily brian! is still around (and hopefully for some time) as he is and will always be a major assit to WHMCS and it's customers...!!

Edited February 2, 2020 by WHMCS ChrisD
removed - Rule 2.2 community guidelines

[CodeCo]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

16

On 31/01/2020 at 10:40 PM, MvdL1979 said:

I have two cents to add to this, as I only stumbled upon this community thread today.

Fire everyone in WHMCS (Removed section 2.2 guideline breech) and make brian! CEO. He is the best person around.
Support with WHMCS itself (not including brian! here obviously) is pretty bad to mediocre (and then I am still being very optimistic).

One of the many, many, many negative experiences with WHMCS's staff was an issue with the license (monthly lease No Branding) on IPv6.
Apparently the license was given out on IPv4 and we never tested IPv6 (as we didn't have an IPv6 address at our office ISP) on our main website.

Anyways about a year ago we received also an IPv6 connection at the office from ISP (mind you, I am not talking about the server or the server's connection at the datacenter; apparently that's all the same with WHMCS support staff).
When I needed to login into our WHMCS admin interface, I was shown the following message:

The license key has been entered incorrectly
The domain being used to access your install has changed
The IP address your install is located on has changed
The directory you are using has changed

I was like... Well you understand. Then I visited the website and I noticed it was showing "Powered by WHMCompleteSolution" everywhere!
Totally unacceptable as we have been paying for the "monthly lease with No Branding"-license for many years. So in other words; everyone who visited our main website on an IPv6-address was shown this garbage.

Obviously I was furious and created a support ticket and I did some more digging on this subject. Apparently (at that moment) someone already created a request for this 5 years (!) ago: https://requests.whmcs.com/topic/allow-ipv6-and-ipv4-in-licensing-module
Apparently you needed to inform WHMCS about your server is also supporting IPv6, otherwise the license would only be active on either one IPv4 or IPv6, but not both at the same time. Sigh.

It took several tickets for them to "understand" the issue, but still they didn't see any harm in it. Ofcourse it's very professional to show garbage text "Powered by WHMCompleteSolution" everywhere on your website towards your customers. What would customers think? I can only guess, but nothing positive. I wouldn't place an order if messages like that are shown on a website; it would put me off and I wouldn't entrust them with my order to be quite honest. So that message was being displayed for almost 5 years on our website (and ordering system) for anyone who visited the website through an IPv6-connection from his ISP.

I asked WHMCS several times why customers were NOT informed about this (at all). They (again) didn't see harm in it apparently. Sigh.
Apparently they did "understand" one thing as they created a KB article shortly after: https://www.whmcs.com/members/index.php/knowledgebase/303/Can-I-use-WHMCS-in-a-Dual-Stack-IP-Environment.html

But obviously the "damage" was already done and (like always) WHMCS does not care for one bit at all. WHMCS is only here to make money and as much as possible. All staff, in my humble opinion, are completely incompetent and only give useless answers.
As I have mentioned many times before and I will mention it one more time (just because he deserves it) brian!, YES BRIAN! is really the only helpful person (on many, many occasions), which we have dealt with in the 5+ years now, who has always helped us.
In those 5+ years we have filed only 19 support tickets with WHMCS and 99% we received bogus answers and bogus support answers. Their main (returning) "answer", which I received the most times when they couldn't comprehend the issue, was "Sorry, WHMCS does not support that, but you can always make a feature request for it!" for e.g. simple things which should work out of the box; like working VAT (which didn't work correctly back then). Or what about moving the domain check to the last page (for servers, hosting, etc.)? Simple things, which should have been possible from day one.

When a potential customer has to enter a domain name first to view prices, they are most likely to be put off and move to a different provider. Ofcourse we can remove the need for a domain name (unwanted) or create a custom field for it on a later page, but that's not the point. Also modifying this is not possible, because that part is encoded and thus cannot be changed or moved. Sheesh. I think we have lost several potential customers because of this. We even had several complaints about this. And what does WHMCS do about it? Simply nothing. Oh wait, that's not true; as you can create a feature request for it. Sigh. And this is the company which advertises themselves with, and I quote: "We pride ourselves in listening to customers." Biggest joke of all time...

I wouldn't be surprised if my post gets removed by staff as they really cannot take criticism or (real) complaints. It's either that or they will simply ignore the whole story and create a reply which is useless and has nothing to with the experiences / issues we have had in the past and now with WHMCS. Unfortunately there are no real solid alternatives out there. Otherwise we would have moved away a very long time ago. It's not a healthy way to treat customers with incompetence and treat them like complete idiots.

Luckily brian! is still around (and hopefully for some time) as he is and will always be a major assit to WHMCS and it's customers...!!

It is very unlikely that they'll remove the post. Also, If you're unhappy, there are other softwares out there. 

While I agree that there are numerous issues with WHMCS, they are working though them still. I hope that WHMCS v8 brings on a bunch of new features that have been requested, and so it's much more well tested compared to current releases which generally need bug fix updates shortly after. 

Edited February 2, 2020 by WHMCS ChrisD
Edited quoted post

[bear]

15 minutes ago, CodeCo said:

It is very unlikely that they'll remove the post

More likely than you think. 

[-M-]

Very true unfortunately. :S

[wsa]

1. What they need to do get the IPv6 working right 

2. Less feature 

3. Release more bugs fixed  that more important than any new feature 

[-M-]

 

14 minutes ago, wsa said:

1. What they need to do get the IPv6 working right 

2. Less feature 

3. Release more bugs fixed  that more important than any new feature 

They also should make things more mobile friendly. A lot of customers use their mobile phones to place orders and they all say it's not so friendly to use. On an iPad or other tablet it's better though.
But then again, we are talking about WHMCS. So in order to get anything like this, you have to request a feature and we all know what happens with those (mainly). Sounds more like wishful thinking. Haha.

We had a developer who was creating a completely custom written system (with only the things we needed), however due to tragic events that stopped unfortunately. Oh well.

[ThemeMetro]

42 minutes ago, wsa said:

1. What they need to do get the IPv6 working right 

2. Less feature 

3. Release more bugs fixed  that more important than any new feature 

I also agree ,

i also want to say something they should release some more beta and RC version before release stable version to avoid release patch version just after few days. and need to much improvement in admin UI as per modern trends, As everybody know that now days mobile users are increased.

Edited January 31, 2020 by ThemeMetro

[-M-]

1 minute ago, ThemeMetro said:

I also agree 

Maybe the ability to remove / disable unused features completely to make it more light weight and usable.
Sometimes it feels slow, though the used hardware is more than capable.

Also better order forms would be nice (along with better mobile support, as mentioned earlier ofcourse).
And since we are asking for the impossible; I want to be less handsome and be rich. 😛

 

[Kian]

41 minutes ago, ThemeMetro said:

and need to much improvement in admin UI as per modern trends

Please, no.

Admin area must be functional and shouldn't follow any trend. Some backend templates (I prefer not to say names) have already indirectly caused big issues to some of my customers 😤 ... last time (yesterday) I had to manually check 40.000 electronic invoices just because of a silly text-transform: uppercase; used in a super lazy way in a custom template. I can no longer stand designers messing up with something crucial like admin interface.

I do not wish to be misunderstood, I have nothing against anyone but adapting to WHMCS (any version), third-party templates and modules not to mention bugs, Europe, regulations, electronic bananas, taxation systems and custom requests that make no sense is awful. I'm the supersayan of frustration at the moment 🤕

[Mark]

5 minutes ago, Kian said:

Please, no.

Admin area must be functional and shouldn't follow any trend. Some backend templates (I prefer not to say names) have already indirectly caused big issues to some of my customers 😤 ... last time (yesterday) I had to manually check 40.000 electronic invoices just because of a silly text-transform: uppercase; used in a super lazy way in a custom template. I can no longer stand designers messing up with something crucial like admin interface.

I do not wish to be misunderstood, I have nothing against anyone but adapting to WHMCS (any version), third-party templates and modules not to mention bugs, Europe, regulations, electronic bananas, taxation systems and custom requests that make no sense is awful. I'm the supersayan of frustration at the moment 🤕

This. And also not this:

Quote

They also should make things more mobile friendly. A lot of customers use their mobile phones to place orders and they all say it's not so friendly to use. On an iPad or other tablet it's better though.

 

WHMCS team needs to focus on the core functionality. Let others worry about the looks.

Edited January 31, 2020 by Mark

[wsa]

 

 

 

 

 

3

1 hour ago, ThemeMetro said:

i also want to say something they should release some more beta and RC version before release stable version to avoid release patch version just after few days. and need to much improvement in admin UI as per modern trends, As everybody know that now days mobile users are increased.

That problem with that I don't think they alot WHMCS customers tester Beta / RC 

 

Yes, it true about mobile that needs to make more better 

[zomex]

This may be controversial but I would really like to see both iWHMCS and aWHMCS dropped in replacement for a mobile friendly browser based alternative perhaps even with its own template allowing users to customise it much like the client area.

I know WHMCS had this in the past but right now both apps are in serious need of improvement. In my opinion it would be better to focus on a browser based solution that we can all benefit from regardless of the device we are using.

Unfortunately I don't think WHMCS will choose to drop the apps. It is a shame as while I use aWHMCS daily there are certain bugs that drive me insane such as 1/10 replies to tickets will be lost. Predefined replies doesn't work. Every once in a while the home screen will show errors.

----

I also hate to see the implementation of WHMCS MarketConnect. It needs to be handled better in terms of respect to users who do not wish to use it. It is very forced throughout WHMCS and from a business side I understand it but from a user perspective it leaves a sour taste.

Edited January 31, 2020 by zomex

[CodeCo]

10 hours ago, MvdL1979 said:

 

They also should make things more mobile friendly. A lot of customers use their mobile phones to place orders and they all say it's not so friendly to use. On an iPad or other tablet it's better though.
But then again, we are talking about WHMCS. So in order to get anything like this, you have to request a feature and we all know what happens with those (mainly). Sounds more like wishful thinking. Haha.

We had a developer who was creating a completely custom written system (with only the things we needed), however due to tragic events that stopped unfortunately. Oh well.

I tried looking into making a custom admin area theme however its a lot less customisable. If they were to make it fully responsive, they could make it a progressive web app so that it acts just like a native app.