A few presales interrogations

[dsaunier]

Hi

After visiting this site many times and hearing a lot about your script on forums, I finally installed the trial version and am about to buy, or at least get the paid rented licence for a few months before buying the lifetime version.

A few questions remain :

- How does the licence work on a technical point of view, does it constantly / often connect to your site ? What would happen if your DNS or domain had an issue, or, sorry to ask, if you went out of business - would my site be lost forever ? You'll understand I need to make sure the solution I choose for my 10-y old hosting business is reliable.

 

- Can I easily remove some sections from the clients homepage and internal sections ? I want to make the pages as simple as possible and get rid of the download section, Affiliates, the server supervision thing etc; and could not see how in the templates, install notes or FAQs. Also I feel some interface choices could be improved - at some points the link to order a new product or register a domain is hard to see and find, I'd like it positioned in a much more intuitive way - can that be done ? Another thing I'd really need changed, and can easily modify in PHP, is the way domains are looked up : we use a much faster look up that lets client enter 1 keyword and have many extensions searched for availability. Sales went up when we installed all such tools that help the (lazy...) clients search and register more domains in a few clicks rather than having to search each one individually. Can I change that in my site if I make it run with your script ?

 

- I am a bit afraid of the customization / upgrade pair for the future. I have seen an apparently nice script that can check which files were changed, but I manage all my projects under SubVersion else in a much stricter manner. Shall I be able to easily upgrade if I customize my site ?

 

As far as my other site (in French) is concerned as it could also make the switch, even though this is only being considered for now, I'd need to add the specific .FR registrar that follows a special process (verifies a France address for an individual, business reg number for companies, generates registation based on that etc). Can such a thing be included in the site ? I must confess I am most of the time really against encrypted sources for such reasons and even though I understand the motivation behind that Ioncude choice, much prefer to buy scripts on which my team can customize things - just did it for a major emailing solution paid around the same price, and we were provided the whole source code.

 

Thank you !

[Nick]

1. As far as I'm aware WHMCS doesn't connect to the WHMCS site to validate the license files, that's all done locally.

 

2. Yes, the template system for the clients area is very flexible and very easy to remove from, alter and add to.

 

3. Updates are relatively painless compared to other software, but you do always need to be careful not to overwrite your customisations. With each release Matt does provide a list of the changed template files in aid of this.

 

4. You'd likely need to get a quote for the development of a custom module for this, drop a ticket to WHMCS.

[Brett]

Welcome to the forums dsaunier! I can answer the first 3 out of 4 questions.

 

1: From the manual - WHMCS uses a local key licensing system with periodic remote verification checks. What this means is that once every 7 days, your WHMCS system will contact our server to ensure it is being run in the correct location and that the license is still valid. Your WHMCS system being online is not dependant on our server being online during the time the local key is valid.

 

Should our licensing server be down on the day your next verification check is due then the system will allow up to 3 days for a connection to be made. If after this time, the system is still unable to verify your license with our licensing server then your WHMCS Admin Area will become inactive until it can contact our server again.

 

Your WHMCS Client Area will always remains online even if you have an invalid or expired license so your clients access is not interrupted.

 

2 and 3: Customizing WHMCS is VERY simple and you can control any aspect of the template and how you want the overall site to look like. Matt is very good about putting what templates he has updated in the changelogs. You can then go through and update your templates accordingly.

 

Just ask if anything does not make sense.

 

Thanks!

[dsaunier]

I had heard a lot of kudos about this site and the script support, but I must say I'm impressed ;-)

Thanks for such quick and efficient replies, I'll study the solution in detail and will submit a ticket for my more advanced customisation questions.

 

Best regards.

[PPH]

You might also like to know that if you have paid for a non branding license, it will be branded in the functional client area should the license check fail for any reason We noticed this when changing locations and doing the license reissue. We wanted to verify that the client area would still function as stated. This was close to a year ago and may have changed, but thought it was worth mentioning.