Use WHMCS public area as web site?

[meeven]

I have WHMCS installed at the root of my domain and am looking to do the following and it's not clear if I can use WHMCS itself or I need any addons:

• Make the public area/pages of the WHMCS install itself as my web site, with a product page for each product/service sold by me
• A link from each product page will take the user to the cart page/checkout

I am aware that the cart pages, invoices can be customized, but it's not clear where to start if I want to add a fresh new page within WHMCS, fill it with the content and images I want and then include a link to the cart/checkout.

Essentially, I am trying to use WHMCS as a barebones web site until I can move on to something like WordPress and spend more time and money linking up the two.

Thanks in advance.

[Kian]

Here you go: Creating Pages. You can create dynamic pages based on products, groups etc. by pulling data directly from WHMCS.

That said, think twice about Wordpress. The amount of time needed to "link" WHMCS and Wordpress could be comparable to implementing everything directly in WHMCS. Having two separate admin interfaces, limited integrations and the need to make WHMCS and Wordpress look the same is painful.

[brian!]

2 hours ago, meeven said:

I am aware that the cart pages, invoices can be customized, but it's not clear where to start if I want to add a fresh new page within WHMCS, fill it with the content and images I want and then include a link to the cart/checkout.

in a word, yes.

https://developers.whmcs.com/advanced/creating-pages/

basically, for each new page you need two files - a .php file as shown above (the example code can be trimmed or expanded to suit your needs) and a .tpl template file (in your active template folder) to output your page - that can contain just plain HTML if you want, or Smarty etc.

if you want to show current product prices on these pages, then you may need a hook (e.g to pull the price(s) from the database), or you could use Data Feeds to output them if that's easier for you.

and with regards to linking products to add them to the cart, then there are plenty of examples of how to do that on the Linking to WHMCS docs page.

[meeven]

@Kian and @brian!,

Thank you both for the links and the helpful suggestions and tips. Appreciate it very much.

With regard to linking WordPress and WHMCS, I was looking at WHMPress, which seems impressive. But, I don't need anything more than a simple site at the moment, so these pages should be enough to get me going.

Thank you both, once again.

 

[Remitur]

9 hours ago, meeven said:

With regard to linking WordPress and WHMCS, I was looking at WHMPress, which seems impressive.

Be care: never, never, never let WP and WHMCS share the same space.

Keep them separated, in different subdomains, on different hosting plans, even on different servers... 😄
Keep particular attention about the db: use different db, with different users.

If WP need to access the WHMCS's db, let it do in read-only mode.
Or, even better, use mysql to dynamically replicate the required contents od WHMCS's db in another db, managed by WP.

 

[brian!]

5 hours ago, meeven said:

With regard to linking WordPress and WHMCS, I was looking at WHMPress, which seems impressive. But, I don't need anything more than a simple site at the moment, so these pages should be enough to get me going.

if you want to use WordPress in the future (there are commercial HTML templates available too), then I would suggest that you wait until a major WHMCS release before doing so, e.g v7.7, v.8, v8 etc... there can be big changes in major releases with no guarantees that things will work as per previous versions.