 I think we're live. We are live. Finger guns. Finger guns. I don't know why I like that so much. So anyway, we're going to talk about another one of the basically the third of the three systems, right? We started kind of with WordPress in the overview. We looked at WHM and turns out we were right with the acronym. It's web host manager. And finally, to throw in more to the acronym SUP, we have WHMCS, which for me took about four years just to get the acronym, right? I kept on saying WHCMS because I was so used to saying content management systems. And Tim was like, it's not WHCMS. It's WHMCS. And now I even know what it stands for. Web host manager, complete solution. In fact, they bill themselves as an automation and billing solution for web host companies like Reclaim Hosting. And the funny story around WHMCS that I tell all the time and I love to tell is that basically when Martha and Tim at the University of Mary Washington, Martha Burdus and Tim Owens started kind of creating domain of one's own. They were actually figuring out a way to automate the creation of accounts using single sign-on. So a university student, which is what all of you are using domain of one's own for basically, well, they sat down and they figured that out. And they reached out on the forums at WHMCS to say, okay, here's our situation. We're trying to get automation of account creation for students at a university, but we don't want anyone to pay anything. And on the forums, people are like, what are you, a bunch of communists? No one's paying? And so that was basically how the WHMCS community greeted our idea of domain of one's own. People always pay, as you know. We just didn't want the students to pay in this case. That actual definition, the billing and automation solution is actually telling because by and large, WHMCS does two things. It creates a client record where you can account for its billing and the lifetime of its account, but it also automates the integration and creation of accounts on top of the WHM server we already looked at. So you can think of WHMCS as middleware that takes care of the account management and also automates the creation of accounts in a C panel server. I was going to say, I think WHMCS, it was really hard to wrap my head around it when I first saw it because I didn't fully understand the role. So I think understanding it's creating the C panel account, but then also over time, I think it becomes more helpful the more you use domain of one's own. So in the beginning, you don't really have a lot of history in domains. You don't have a lot of records or use cases. So the need to look through logs and things, it doesn't quite make sense, but when you're a couple of years into domain of one's own, you have a record of everyone who has logged in when they signed up for an account and that's all tracked. And you have a lot of really cool reporting options in WHMCS that we'll get into even later tomorrow. So I think WHMCS, not only is it creating the C panel accounts automatically for you, but then it becomes a really solid record book. It's like a file. And I like the way you say that. Like you've said that in more than a few trainings where WHMCS, if you're thinking of it as an admin, it's a really good record book and archive of who's had an account, how long they've had an account, when that account expired. And that's stuff you don't necessarily, that's a record you don't necessarily want to purge. Even if their account leaves WHM, WHMCS is an excellent accounting of what happened when and why. And we even say, you know, if you're cleaning up accounts for years from now, you know, terminate the account. Sure, remove it from the server, but don't remove the record in WHMCS because you want to be able to define that usage over time. You want to know how many people have interacted with domains, you know, what's the longevity for each account that we're kind of supporting here? How many of them are being transferred out? And so you can keep statuses for each account. So this might be a nice transition for you, Jim, as you kind of talk through the basics of the products that we're hosting. Each C panel is called a product in WHMCS. And you can have different statuses for those products. So when you first log into WHMCS, you'll see, you know, you have a number of pending orders. And then you also have a bunch of tabs up here. And this is kind of like an overview of the system. So pending orders versus active orders, it actually for your purposes, it doesn't matter if an order is pending. It just means it went through to the system. But really here is where you can see the status of orders. You can get a sense, obviously, of the billing reports, clients, et cetera. So that's very useful. For us, by and large, we always want to look at a particular client, right? So when I'm going into WHMCS, nine times out of 10, I'm looking for a specific client. So for example, I'm going to use Lauren Hanks example again. And I'm going to search for her account on state U. So I'll click here. And here is exactly what I think WHMCS is really good at. WHMCS is really good for giving you an overview. Most of the client's information will be stock information for your university. We don't collect students address or our faculty's address. That's all the university stock address. The only thing that's unique to them is the email. And then profile contacts, you know, that's all information that you already have. You can update it there, contacts, et cetera. But really, as Lauren already mentioned, the most important tab in WHMCS for a specific client is this product and services. This gives us the server they're on. So here we see state U server. There are some schools that have multiple servers. So this becomes more important for them than obviously if you have one. The product and service, right? So this could be a space where you have multiple products. For example, advanced hosting versus simple hosting. This is what Lauren already talked about when we were looking at WHM. So this is really useful and something where you can have multiple products for a particular user. This is the domain. So this is Lauren's subdomain, laurenhangs.state.org. That, again, if it's changed in WHM, it should be changed in WHMCS. And we'll talk more about that in a later session. But here we also have username and password, which is the actual C panel account username and password, not to be confused with the single sign-on. This information is basically, if you want to sign in directly to C panel outside of the domain of one's own integration or if you want to access SFTP or SSH. So those are specific credentials for the C panel account. And then you'll see the status of the account. It's active. When it was registered, there's no payment information, hence the communism comment. But then these are module commands that integrate with WHM or with the C panel server directly. For example, this is a module to create an account. You can automatically suspend an account, which is super nice, which means you can take an account that's online and take it offline. Should there be an incident or a question mark or some sort of copyright violation? And then that, if everything is cleared, can be basically unsuspected almost immediately and nothing's lost. Terminate not the case. Terminate when you terminate it, it's gone. We do have backups, so don't freak out too much about that. But this is actually a lot more severe than suspend. And then, or not finally, but almost finally, penultimately, change package. And this goes back to the idea of changing from, say, a, again, like Lauren said, from the simple or basic package to something like advanced. If you don't have multiple packages, you don't have to worry about it. But if you do, this is where you would change it. For example, with our shared hosting, we have basically student, professional, and organizational. If you wanted to bump up from professional to organizational, that's where we would change the package which changed certain elements of your account. Basically, storage gets bigger. And finally, if you want to change your password, you could do that here. And I'm not going to really do it, but I'm going to pretend to do it. And this would allow me, once I save the changes, to sync the changing of the password here in WHMCS would push it over to WHM. And that's really what all of these module commands are doing. They're taking information that you have here in WHMCS, and they're basically syncing it with WHM. So again, this is kind of like the remora that lives on top of the WHMC panel server shark. And, well, I guess that's a terrible metaphor. Anyway, it's something that lives on top of something that shares and gives data where it's a remora just to eat all the food. So anyway, bad metaphors for life. But no, I love the module command though. I do because I think it allows you to communicate with the server without being logged into the server. And while you do technically have the option to suspend and terminate accounts, change C-Panel passwords, even create accounts in WHM on the server itself, we recommend doing it here in WHMCS so you have that record. One of the fastest ways that Domain of One Zone can get out of hand is if you're doing things on the server without recognizing it in WHMCS. Things can get out of sync that way. And I think Domain of One Zone is great in that we're minimizing passwords for users. We create this bridge from WordPress into C-Panel where the user signs up for an account, they see C-Panel, they don't have to know that C-Panel account password. So we're kind of creating these little bridges and the way that we can do that is by syncing up all of the various systems of Domain of One Zone. So the second that you kind of go out of order and you go from just directly to the server and create accounts, you're missing all of those steps in WordPress and WHMCS. Things get out of sync and then those embeds don't work properly. So that's usually where we see a lot of our support tickets from Domain of One Zone admins is, you know, things are out of sync because they went out of order. So just keep that in mind. If you want to make changes, best practice is to start in WHMCS. You know, we're honestly even like we said earlier this morning, logging in through WordPress, switching users into that user profiles account and working as the user themselves. Obviously, there are some changes that the user can't make on their own. That's why WHMCS is really helpful. So I'm going to share my screen now too. Jim kind of covered the products and services page or the products and services tab. Now I want to point to some other tabs here. Kind of like Jim said, there's a lot of billing jargon. You see quotes and voices, billable items. You can disregard all of that. It's not why we're, you know, we don't charge our accounts. So it's not going to be helpful for us. But emails and log are really helpful. They become helpful over time because we can see exactly what has been sent to the user. So you can see that a new account information email was sent to a user or to me, I guess, when I signed up for this account. And this is just an email template. So let me make that a little bigger so you can see here. But you can brand them for your university. So this is our demo school. So I can change the subject, the logo, the language. So it's also going to have some information about the domain name that they signed up for, their FTP username and password. We have some schools that take this out for security reasons. You can choose that if you'd like. It's just in an email template that goes to the user. And this email template comes in WHMCS. I'll show you where that happens. But yeah, we have some institutions that like to change this and completely reframe what the user should be thinking about when they first sign up for an account. So if you want to add in documentation, resources to different trainings or office hours, things like that, this is a great space to do that because it's the first thing they see when they get an account. And also just for support reasons, it's nice to be able to see that timestamp for when something is sent to the user. So you can say, actually, I can see that it was sent to you here. I'm happy to resend it if you need to. So if you ever needed to resend that email, I think it happens from the product services tab. And I can scroll down and I can resend that welcome email right there. I can also send out additional emails. So we have a whole slew of email templates depending on how you want to communicate with your users. So you can see here, we've got trial emails and things like that because this is a demo server. But if someone requests just various things, you can send out, hey, we suspended your account. Here's a notification or unsuspendage your account. Different things like that. But that welcome email is right there. You also have the admin notes, which becomes kind of helpful too. This is in the product services tab in case you need to just make notes about an account for another admin. Scrolling out here, there's a little log tab. I like this as well. You can see that we've got one real admin doing work. Again, this is our demo server. But for your institution that has maybe multiple domain of one's own admins, you can see who's logging in and doing what. So it looks like we've got an API that actually is creating the account automatically for us, sending in the marketing emails. There's some errors here just because it's a demo soul. So keep that in mind. But you can see exactly when the user signed up for an account. Again, we've got some billing jargon. It can be disregarded. Module create. So there's that module create command where it's creating the C panel account automatically. It's just basically WHMCS is automatically clicking that create button, punching out a C panel to the server and telling us that that happened successfully. And then it of course sends that email. So it gives a log of everything that's going on. If Jim were to go in to the product services tab and click suspend, it's going to log that here as well and say Jim Groom suspended the account. So I think it's kind of helpful. I can then also leave a note on an account if I wanted to to say Lauren was suspended for copyright whatever yada yada. Maybe I want to sign it and I can make it important and click add. And so now anyone that comes to this product or this client profile later on sees that note. So we use this all the time for our internal shared hosting WHMCS so and so requested a cancellation or requested that this moves to another user, something like that. And it just kind of keeps everyone in the loop. So when in doubt over communication, that's I use that more ways than one but in WHMCS it becomes super helpful. And it's high time that you were suspended too. I mean, I'm going to be clear on that. And you can look in the in the logs now and you'll see that you have been suspended. And that's actually always good to see that. I think that's a good example. And then when I unsuspend it will ask for a reason and that will go in the logs too. Yeah. And we're kind of going against our recommendations here and we're both signed in as the reclaim hosting user. We actually recommend that each admin have their own profile. So you can see who is making those changes because right now it's just this all-encompassing reclaim figure that is has suspended. But I want to know that Jim suspended my account so I can go to him out when I get mad at him for suspending my account. So it also allows you to see who's online at a given point. So let's say, all right, you have a team of admins. You want to create some profiles for them. When we onboard you with domain of one zone, we will help you create those admin accounts. But in the event that you know there's a change of hands or you want to bring someone else in, it's under set up. And let me see if I can make this a little bigger here. So if I go to set up, scroll over to staff management and it's going to be administrator users. That's what you want to go to. You're going to need to put in your state you or yeah, you're going to need to put in your password to see this side of things. You can see Alan has a password. A captain Spencer. You know, Chris, there's a few again demo schools. You never know what you're going to get. But if you need to add in a new administrator here. So, you know, we wanted to create one for Jim. I could do that here. I'll do Jim at reclimbhosting.com, Jay Groom. And I'll just, you know, give you a suggested password and click save changes. And there you go. So Jim's now full administrator and he would have those credentials to be able to log in and have different records for the staff online space. So that's how you would create an admin. I guess next thing to share since we have a few extra minutes would be some of the mass email stuff. I talked about how we have some templates. That is also under set up and you scroll down to email templates. You'll see again that there's a lot that we don't use specifically because this is a billing space, right? So we have a lot of that disabled, especially for our demo schools. Our demo school doesn't have any kind of domain registration. And unless you are one of the unique domain schools that does provide top level domains for schools, a lot of this will be turned off for you as well. So you'll see a few here. I like to, let me just actually do a command find and then search welcome. Yeah, so maybe, you know, the account welcome email. Where is it? Count. It's the fourth one down. Hosting account welcome. Okay, so I can click on that here and you can see you can change exactly where it's coming from the subject. There's all of that language there that I showed you earlier. So it allows you to just kind of pull that in and change things as you want. You can also actually create your own email templates. So this becomes helpful for folks that want to send out mass emails to folks. Maybe you want to create an email template that's going to go out to folks as, you know, they're leading up to their account being closed because they're graduating or things like that. So we have a whole slew of documentation articles around just communication to users and to thinking through exit strategies for domains in general. We'll talk about that more later on today as well. But just kind of wanted to point to that now that that's where you would make those changes down in email templates. And I guess it's also worth mentioning too because I think we skipped over it in the beginning. If you wanted to see a list of all users, that would happen in WHMCS client, under clients view slash search clients. So that's where you would see a list of everyone that's actually using domain of one zone. And that active status will become helpful for you all when you want to see, okay, active refers to someone that maybe has actually signed up for an account. They see the services there. But someone who's just signed in to domain of one zone with authenticated with single sign-on, but they never actually signed up for an account, that's going to show you zero services and inactive. So it does kind of become useful because you can get a sense, okay, let me email everyone with an inactive status and figure out why they didn't move forward with signing up for an account. So WHMCS has a lot of cool reporting that I do like when it becomes helpful over time. I agree and I do think that like as folks particularly, the emails become useful as you're starting with the provision which we'll talk about. And like you said, with the active status and the way in which on WHM everything pretty much that's in WHM is a kind of account that works towards your 500 accounts, a quota. Whereas in WHMCS you can have hundreds of accounts beyond that quota, but if they're inactive or terminated that's a good record for you to have to also manage it. So you can have a lot more accounts in WHMCS than you have in WHM, but you're not being billed for those if they're inactive or terminated in WHMCS. But that goes back to where we started, Lauren. We're talking about WHMCS is a really good kind of bookkeeping record keeping software that at first we said, oh, we're just using it for automation, but over time we have found through the logs and through the various kind of commands that allow you and actually the way it tracks your users that it's very useful. Certainly, so WordPress and WHMCS, you've got those that view of users. It's just your record of how it's being interacted with how domains is being used. The C panel itself, WHM, that's where we're really tracking the accounts that are actually on the server taking up space. But looks like next we're going to talk about some helpful support tips for administering and managing domains. So we'll get into that later today, but thanks for tuning in on a look into WHMCS. Great, thank you.