 This is our session on WHMCS. I'm Taylor. This is Pilot. I'm pointing in the wrong direction. That's correct. And we're going to walk you through, well, really, Pilot is going to do the bulk of the driving here, and I'm here for, I think the technical term is color commentary in the sports industry. Moral support? Walk you through WHMCS kind of where it fits in the domain of one's own management, you know. Ecosystem? Ecosystem. That's a good word. I don't say puzzle, but I don't want to make it sound confusing. But there is like layers to all this stuff, right? Like we talked earlier in the day about kind of how the three big systems fit and sort of what roles they play with WordPress being the front end. And we're going to get to WHMCS in a second, and that's really about managing users in the system and what they have access to and if they have accounts and things like that. And then later on, we'll talk about WHM, which is kind of more the servery stuff, basically. But so I kind of think of WHMCS as kind of, I liked in my head, I think of these as layers and like the outer layer being WordPress. A one layer down is WHMCS and WHM is even one further. So we're going to talk about WHMCS. That stands for Web Host Management Complete Solution. Terrible name. I don't like that. I don't like that at all. Yeah, it's a bad name. And we're going to kind of walk through it and if you have any questions a while ago, feel free to put them in Discord. And yeah. So I'm going to get Pilots screen up here and we'll showcase WHMCS. Yeah. All right. So basically we've talked a little bit about this before. As Taylor said, we talked about how the three systems work together. Amanda and I mentioned WHMCS a little bit in our WordPress session. But the main thing to think about WHMCS as I like to think of the domain of one's own system is layers where WordPress is the outer layer. It's what you'll be using the most often. It's what the users will see and have access to. WHM, the server is the innermost part that'll have the nitty gritty settings. It's where data is stored, things like that. And Taylor and I will talk about that a little bit later. But WHMCS is the middle. It's the bridge. It connects everything. It's responsible for making single sign-on work with WHMC. WHM. And just having everything hook up cleanly. So the idea of single sign-on is used in WordPress so that users can sign in with the credentials that they know. They don't need to learn any new credentials for their C-panels. And WHMCS is responsible for taking that information and going, ah, single sign-on to this account means deliver this C-panel from the server, make it available in WordPress. WHMCS is also responsible for the original provisioning of accounts. So earlier, Amanda and I showed off what it looks like for a user to sign up, that sort of 10-second countdown that we were talking about. That is the time when WHMCS is saying to the server, hey, this user signed in, asked for this. Can you get it set up? And I'll send it right back. I like WHMCS. I think it's fun. You aren't going to need it too much. It's useful in long-term user management, particularly deprovisioning, which is something Taylor and I are going to talk about tomorrow. But that's just a good overview of how to think about WHMCS and what its role in the, as we said, ecosystem is. So we're going to start with just the basics. And we're going to use me as a test case because if you can see recently, I set up a new account. That is the account that we set up in the WordPress. It's right down here in the corner. That's the account that we set up in the WordPress session with Amanda. And that's the example of when we were creating it then. WHMCS was getting everything set up over here. So let's just hop in. If you want to see the full client list, client here means everyone who has ever signed into WordPress. If you sign into WordPress, even if you don't create a C panel account, you are registered in WHMCS as someone who has touched the system. This is also useful because WordPress is great. It's super useful for on-the-ground troubleshooting, for managing all the day-to-day. It's not awesome in the keeping records and logs department, which is also what WHMCS is really good at. So if you want to see all of the users who have ever signed into WordPress, all of the things that they've done, you can go to view, search clients here, and it'll show you a big old list of everybody. I'm not going to go in there right now because StateU.org is our sandbox site that people use to test out Domain of One's Own, which means that there's just a whole bunch of people in there. And I already have the little account that I set up, so we can just go straight to that and show you what a user profile looks like. So just type me in. I am extremely searchable. Nobody else ever has my name in the system. You can see I have a terminated account because I was testing this. You don't have two first names like I do. I do not. Although I imagine Jaden's pretty searchable. Kind of. But like I said, sometimes it's someone's first name, usually spelled in E though. That's true. Yeah. I have two accounts listed here. One is terminated because I was testing some things earlier and then I got rid of it so that we could use me as a demo in the WordPress session. So here is just the overall summary page. You can see first name, last name, my email address, my address, which is not in the system because it's not really relevant. You don't need that. In your institution setup, the address here will be listed as the institution's address for every single user. WHNCS is by default a billing software. We actually use it to manage our own clients that reclaim. But you don't need billing for anything that we're doing for anything that we use WHNCS for. So you can ignore that. Don't worry about it. One thing I wanted to point out here too before we go further in the profile is that the email address is importantly what single sign-on is looking for in most almost every domain of one's own setup, right? So if that email address is not correct or if it changes, the user won't be able to log in their account and this is where you'd probably have to fix it. Yes. If you ask us at Reclaim, we can help you diagnose or fix it, right? But that comes up every once in a while. Yeah. I believe we had an admin actually at one point who reached out to us because they had changed their name for, you know, personal reasons, lots of reasons to change your name and changed their email accordingly and then tried to sign into their account and went, oh no. WHMCS was like, here's your new account if you want it. And they were like, no. So we just had to make sure that email matched up and once that was the case, they were set. Yep. Sometimes we've had rare occasions too where a school has changed in bulk all like the format of all email addresses and that also can affect it too. And in case you'd reach out, we can help you with that change. Sure. Yeah. So moving on from the email, you'll see, again, on the idea of this as a summary, this lineup here shared hosting is just all of the C panel accounts that I have ever signed up for. There's two total, one active because as I said earlier, I terminated an account. I got rid of it so that Amanda and I could use my account as a demonstration for the sign up. The other thing is I talked earlier about WHMCS being a record of everyone who's ever signed into WordPress. That is an important distinction because our domain of one's own licenses come in blocks of 500. That is not 500 people in WHMCS. That is 500 C panel accounts on the server, which is a different thing. People can sign into WordPress and get registered in WHMCS without ever actually creating their C panel account, and so they will not count towards that license. This is a summary, again, so you can scroll down and you can see people's accounts. This is the accounts. They also have options for domains. If your school offers top-level domains, which is a pretty niche case, but it does happen, those domains might be found here. Hopping over now, there's two tabs that I use, really that I would use as a domain of one's own admin when I did that, which was products and services and log, and we'll get to that in a minute. So products and services is where you can look at the details for a specific account. So here are, it's a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a list of accounts that I have. So here is a list of all of the accounts that I have. The one that's been terminated is in red. That one no longer exists, but you can see that when it existed it had this domain. It was on the server. It doesn't exist anymore so you can't sign into it with C panel, but it was registered on for managing it, we are going to actually we'll stay here if we hopped to this it would look exactly the same be a hundred no different at all but we are gonna hop we're gonna stay here because the this account is terminated so this username and password is useless and this is being live recorded so I don't want to show off more cPanel credentials yeah that's why it's terminated right we terminate these after shortly after workshops so that yeah they're not just out there but yeah yeah is it so you know information security but also this account's gonna go away in a day max but so the next thing or the big thing to look at here is the module commands there's three main ones that would be relevant and then a couple of others that I can talk about so WHM CS is where we would do deprovisioning work and the idea being that if there comes a time when a user no longer needs their cPanel account either because they've graduated or they were using it for a course and they don't want it anymore you would be able to use these commands to manage that suspension just suspends an account in that it makes it no longer publicly available the account data still exists the account is still on the server but it's not something that users can access it's not something that people can go to that domain and see the site it's just offline and they'll get an error when they try to log in that says this account is suspended now yeah exactly and so you might use suspension actually in the case of sometimes very very infrequently I think I mean I haven't worked here for five years but the number I've heard is maybe once in the past five years there comes a case where a user is posting things that the institution doesn't want associated with them or that violates the terms of use or something like that maybe something risque and that is a great time to suspend the account you're not getting rid of the data yet but then you can sit down with the user and say hey we maybe need to have a talk about this about cleaning up your account about not doing this and maybe figuring out what next steps are you can use that time to clean up the account to figure out how the user is going to proceed how the institution is going to proceed and to bring that account back online you just don't suspend and it's as simple as that terminating does remove the account fully gets rid of it takes it off the server the account data is gone we keep backups for 30 days after an account is terminated so within that time we can restore an account that was mistakenly terminated if needed but that after that you know it's gone although we are happy to push those backups to a third-party location that the institution has so you know it doesn't have to be gone in general I do want to say that you don't have to do this manually it's fine it particularly in bulk so if you are bulk deprovisioning in case of graduation you can come to us and say can you suspend these 150 accounts I don't want to go through and press all the buttons myself because that sounds like a terrible use of my time and we'll say yeah we have a script for that we'll just run it it'll just go like that and we'll talk about a lot more about deprovisioning and stuff like like mentioned earlier we have a session tomorrow on that but it is I think good to kind of see this where it is in here because there are times where you want to do one-off suspension unsuspension or termination and this is where it lives yeah exactly so the module command there so those are the big three there are also the module can't commands create change package and change password I'm going to cover them really quickly change password probably the most important of the three in that sometimes the connection that WHMCS creates between the single sign-on in WordPress and the server will get unstuck we'll get unglued rather is sort of the way to put it so a user will sign in and they're not getting an error message they're basically just getting a blank screen because that cPanel and bed has not come over from the server that information hasn't delivered and the first step in that situation is basically to come in here and hit change password and that just rebuilds that bridge and recreates that connection it can never hurt to do this so this is a great first step for troubleshooting that's still a more niche use case so not part of the main three change package we'll talk about this a bit later in the WHM session but accounts can have different packages which defines what resources are available to them what the account settings are for them and so if you wanted to change the package we don't have an option for it here but there would be an option to switch what that is and then hit the change package button and that would swap them over on the server that would control that and then create I've never heard of anyone using this create creates the account from scratch again so it still exists but it's blank so if a user came to you and said I love this I've had a great time this has been wonderful I definitely want to keep using this but I also want to get rid of everything I've ever done I want to clean slate I want to start from scratch you could hit create and it would do that yeah I I would as a if I was in your shoes as an admin I would be very very explicit with them on mentioning what that means because I think especially folks who are new to this but even if you're not it can be really confusing folks end users right students faculty who are using their account their CPn account to distinguish between are we restarting a WordPress site or restarting the entire account what's going to be changing here right so it is good I think I'd be very careful about pressing that button of course backups could be restored if that needed to be done within 30 days but yeah it's kind it would be a weird request not that it hasn't happened it definitely definitely people will ask for that but just make sure before you click that button that they don't want to just restart a WordPress site and which case they could do that in their CPn with install Tron and that they maybe have other things on their account like a couple other sites or something like that so yeah I like to cover it because I like to make sure that you know what the buttons do so that you can choose whether or not you're pressing them well any reasonable assumption to say I bet that button doesn't work if the accounts already created no it does it does it does something yep only press that button if you are sure yeah I guess you confirm but you know still yeah yeah and then I think the other thing that I really want to touch on is the log so earlier I talked about how WordPress is really great for troubleshooting for going into checking on users accounts things like that it's not great for record keeping but WHMCS is so it's possible to do some of the account management stuff we've talked about in WHM it's all manual there basically and it also doesn't enter into this log so this is just useful in terms of keeping track of information it says when things were created it sends what says when things are terminated so you'll see that account was created I got an email about it that account was deleted that account was created I got an email about it that account has the new account has not yet been terminated but you can see which admin was responsible for this WHMCS does allow for multiple administrative accounts so we recommend that everybody on your team has their own separate one linked to their own email their own username it says when it happened which can be really useful just for tracking things down we really really really recommend that if you were going to do user management in the ways that we've talked about particularly suspension on suspension termination that you do it here just so you can keep track of things it's very very useful yeah changes that you make here will apply to WHM but changes that you make in WHM won't automatically apply back here right yeah this is not a two-way between WHMCS and WHM not a two-way conversation it's a one-way conversation and yeah pretty much every case so yeah exactly I'm just trying to see how much time we have Taylor do we have enough time to go into the emails do you think yeah I think we do okay cool so one of the nice things about WHMCS in the same way that it's managing all of these users all of these profiles is that you have the option to send mass emails and we'll also talk about this for communications purposes tomorrow in the deep provisioning session but I'm just going to navigate it to it right now if you have this version of WHMCS if your version of WHMCS looks like this this is where you would find it and this is the name email campaigns under the utility section if you have a different version of WHMCS it's gonna look a little different yeah in clients mass mail tool yeah so this tab and then you know mass mail tool isn't listed here but if it were that would be where you go so you would going to email campaigns utilities email campaigns allows the sending of an email message to a group of clients ranging from every client on file to those who meet specific criteria what that means is pretty much what it sounds like you can send an email to everyone in the system or a couple of people depending so WHMCS allows for things called client groups so if you wanted to say all right everyone who is graduating in the class of I guess 2023 that's our school year now everyone who's graduating the class of 2023 their account goes into a client group and then I'm gonna send specific emails to them saying oh you're graduating soon what do you want to do this is why Taylor and I are going to talk about it in the deeper reasoning session tomorrow that's one of the really useful things about WHMCS in general Taylor yeah it's it's just a fantastic tool this this email campaign or mass mail tool like it said or like pilot said that we're gonna demo it more tomorrow a little bit but but just know that it is powerful because you get a nice email like you know visual email templates and stuff that can be configured but out of the box it will use a pretty good template that uses your your school's logo it's kind of built in there I believe and so that's that's nice and obviously it can send a bunch of email at once but then crucially because it's like a mail merge tool you know it'll you can do things like include people's name and domain or account name if you wanted all kinds of information in the email to personalize it rather than just being a to who they concern exactly so that's great it's built in I think it's a really powerful tool for admins it's also probably a good idea to make a client group and put yourself in it to do test emails so you can just you know make one that's just you or maybe you and a teammate that can you know try the email out and then roll it out to everyone it does give you nice previews but I don't know I'm always anxious when I'm about to hit the button on a bulk email so I like to do double and triple checks but it's a great tool and we'll dig a little bit more into it tomorrow hopefully so yeah measure twice cut once that's I think most of what I wanted to cover in WHMCS is there anything you think we're missing the only other thing I wanted to mention is that I think is worth mentioning is maybe that this tool you know you'll you be provided with credentials to log in but you can make other accounts for other folks who may need access on your team if that's the case WHMCS lets you make accounts directly into the interface you can share credentials if you want to but I always think it's a good better idea to have multiple people have their own logins that way you can revoke a login if they leave yeah that's possible you can do it yourself you can ask us to do it in a ticket but it's it's very easy to just do the other manage admins page so that's a good that's a good thing to do if you have someone else that needs to be in here and working with these accounts for sure and it also means in addition to what Taylor said of you know you you can just revoke that if they end up leaving the institution it's also great for that log that we were showing earlier because there is that section that says this user this admin is what was responsible for this action in the system who did what here when that can be yeah a life just trying to depending on the situation so yeah awesome well right anything else I don't think so can you stop my screen share please yeah so that's our tour of WHM CS and up next is gonna be WHM see you all soon see you all soon