Tutorial for new commers

[ImpendingMisfortune]

Hi,

 

I recently got to know about WHMCS and now I'm interested in writing modules/addons to solve a problem.

To my surprise there was no SDK, no tutorial to show what WHMCS is and how it should be used (like the Laravel docs for example), no official documentation to teach the basics (like PHP Internals Book), no documentation about the core (like the PHP SDK for AWS), nothing I could rely on. From a developer standpoint I need a solid understanding of the fundamentals of a framework to start using it and not ask too many questions on forums.

URLs like https://developers.whmcs.com/modules/, https://developers.whmcs.com/themes/ and https://developers.whmcs.com/api/ are meaningless since I don't even know the internal structure of the framework, classes, databases, hooks, event listeners, error handlers, logs or anything. Trying to develop anything based on them would be like asking a blind person to run a marathon by just hinting "follow the pavement", which is basically what I've been trying to do for the last couple of weeks.

All of the above might sound rude for modern standards, I'm aware. To be fair I'm not asking someone to solve my problem, I'm asking for help to understand the fundamentals of WHMCS for a developer to solve his problems on his own.

How can someone that *knows absolutely nothing about a framework* (obfuscated behind ionCube, to make ir worse) learn about its fundamentals in order to reliably and confidently write marketable modules?

Beginners documentation's, code samples, useful links, 101 books, anything would be greatly appreciated.

[bhudah]

Good morning, 

Did you get any assistance with this? I also need this type of information and there seems to be no YouTube, LinkedIn learning tutorials. 

[pRieStaKos]

You can check WHMCS GitHub pages, like https://github.com/WHMCS/sample-addon-module in developers.whmcs.com.

Also there is classdocs.whmcs.com

[yggdrasil]

On 4/2/2022 at 11:15 PM, ImpendingMisfortune said:

Hi,

 

I recently got to know about WHMCS and now I'm interested in writing modules/addons to solve a problem.

To my surprise there was no SDK, no tutorial to show what WHMCS is and how it should be used (like the Laravel docs for example), no official documentation to teach the basics (like PHP Internals Book), no documentation about the core (like the PHP SDK for AWS), nothing I could rely on. From a developer standpoint I need a solid understanding of the fundamentals of a framework to start using it and not ask too many questions on forums.

URLs like https://developers.whmcs.com/modules/, https://developers.whmcs.com/themes/ and https://developers.whmcs.com/api/ are meaningless since I don't even know the internal structure of the framework, classes, databases, hooks, event listeners, error handlers, logs or anything. Trying to develop anything based on them would be like asking a blind person to run a marathon by just hinting "follow the pavement", which is basically what I've been trying to do for the last couple of weeks.

All of the above might sound rude for modern standards, I'm aware. To be fair I'm not asking someone to solve my problem, I'm asking for help to understand the fundamentals of WHMCS for a developer to solve his problems on his own.

How can someone that *knows absolutely nothing about a framework* (obfuscated behind ionCube, to make ir worse) learn about its fundamentals in order to reliably and confidently write marketable modules?

Beginners documentation's, code samples, useful links, 101 books, anything would be greatly appreciated.

There are mainly 2 reasons you will not find such an extensive documentation for WHMCS:

1. It's not open source, and I don't mean license wise, but code wise, its completely encoded. Hence, most code is not editable, and it would make little sense for them to document how each class, method or function works, since you can't access them anyway. What you can access is what you get in terms of coding, that means:

a) Editing template files

b) Creating PHP hooks

c) Using the API

You can't edit the internal code or files in anyway, even third-party libraries settings are mostly encoded, or they pull them from encoded files which means replacing something will break something else. You are limited to those 3 options for developing, if a hook, or method is not available, you are out of luck.

2. The second reason is they keep changing things all the time and I suspect not every developer knows how everything works in WHMCS that is working with them, since tons of code is legacy, example, most vendor libraries or even the Laravel framework was only added later. At this point they are mixing stuff and slowly migrating things which means they are changing all the time.

WHMCS is quite extensible with the hooks and API. While they removed several things from template themes and I suspect they will remove more as they move away from Smarty, it's still quite editable at least for the front end. The back end, not that much.

You will find out that in the end, there is no documentation for some tricks and people just learned by playing around until it works or they find an error.

In the past wasn't a big deal because the forums and active user base was very active, it was likely you could find someone did what you are trying before, or someone could answer and help with things but as WHMCS moved to their new pricing scheme, you probably found out that most users left (me included) to new pastures.

As such they are not even active here in the forums anymore as they are probably using other software's at this point. I warned about this, WHMCS would lose a huge amount of its value once the community and power users are gone, since new people like you will just find legacy answers and code that probably does not work anymore today or will stop working as the software advances with new releases.

To be fair, I do find WHMCS has good documentation vs other similar software's.

Sad, but it's how the current things are here. 🤷‍♀️

Edited April 6, 2022 by yggdrasil