How do you manage multiple control panel customers with WHMCS?

[Beekingo]

Hello everyone, after several cPanel price increases I am seriously considering starting to use other control panels.

Clients will coexist with cPanel and with the alternatives and I wonder how you manage that with WHMCS.

Suppose I have three hosting plans, ONE, TWO and THREE. The first thing I think of is to create a plan for each control panel but I think it is inefficient. For example of the ONE plan I have to have:

ONE with cPanel $10
ONE with DirectAdmin $8
ONE with Virtualmin $5
etc.

And so for the TWO and THREE plans.

Do you know if with WHMCS I can create only 3 plans and that the control panel is one more option in the shopping cart wizard, so that later the account is automatically created on the server that corresponds to the chosen control panel?

I don't know how to achieve this with product addons or configurable options.

Thanks

[yggdrasil]

It's not possible to create a plan that selects a different control panel by default because when you create a plan you select a specific module for that plan. It means it uses the API for that specific server control panel.

This could be done with some coding, example, you have a custom module, for all plans, and that module then uses the selected control panel module depending on the cart selection, but it would require a specific module that acts as a proxy or gateway.

Out of the box, your only option is creating a different plan for each control panel.

You could create a product category for each one, example, cPanel Plans, DirectAdmin Plans, and let customers pick. Then have the same plans for each one but the only difference is the type of server they will use.

Edited December 15, 2022 by yggdrasil

[Kian]

Agree with @yggdrasil but I think you can make it easier. First create your groups of products like in the following example:

• cPanel
  • Bronze (Id #1)
  • Silver (Id #2)
  • Gold (Id #3)
• Plesk
  • Bronze (Id #4)
  • Silver (Id #5)
  • Gold (Id #6)
• DirectAdmin
  • Bronze (Id #7)
  • Silver (Id #8)
  • Gold (Id #9)
• Proxy
  • Bronze (Id #10)
  • Silver (Id #11)
  • Gold (Id #12)

Configure all cPanel, Plesk and DirectAdmin products with their respective panels, templates/plans, servers (...) and make them "Hidden" so that they can't be directly ordered. Now let's focus on Proxy. Define general settings and features (eg. disk space, bandwidth, ftp accounts, price) and create a configurable option from which users can select the control panel they want like in the following example:

• cPanel +5 euro
• Plesk +4 euro
• DirectAdmin +2 euro

Module Settings tab should be configured with "Auto Release". Leave everything set to "None". We need it to make use of "Automatically setup the product as soon as the first payment is received" feature.

When the user places the order for "Proxy > Bronze (Id #10) with cPanel" and pays it, WHMCS triggers "Module Create" with "Auto Release" module. Here is where you should intervene. Check module parameters to verify if "serviceid" is 10, 11 or 12 (Ids of Proxy products). If true, abort the command with PreModuleCreate (abortcm=true) and run this query to update the following columns:

• tblhosting.packageid - Replace 10 (Proxy > Bronze) with 1 (cPanel > Bronze)
• tblhosting.server - Replace it with the Id of your cPanel server on WHMCS

At this point your have successfully completed the switch from Proxy > Bronze to cPanel > Bronze. You can now re-run ModuleCreate action with localAPI(). WHMCS will create the hosting on cPanel. Job done.

Edited December 16, 2022 by Kian

[Beekingo]

Thank you for your replies. @Kian, I will dig into this.