 Well, hey Amanda. Hey Meredith. How's it going? We're ready for day two or day one. Sorry. Wow session we afternoon sessions of The workshop so hopefully the conversations have been a wonderful so far and we're looking forward to the rest of the afternoon So we're working through making WHMCS work for you in your domain of one's own instance on that so we're going to look at the best practices for working in WHMCS and Customizing it to work for your workflows in domain of one's own as well Yeah, so today we're going to be talking more specifically about things like changing account ownership and so the most popular kind that of Change account ownership that we see is managing multiple users for one cPanel We're going to talk about client groups what that means what you can do with them Also working with the mass mail tool admin notes for profiles and then also creating additional admins within the WHMCS portal Cool, okay, so as we were talking about in the topics of discussion We want to make sure that we talk through the importance of WHMCS as well on that side because the within the three systems that we've got through the word press WHMCS and WHM that we kind of Overviewed in the the live session earlier It's important to note that WHMCS is kind of the backbone Inner workings of the server where it's the communication piece between WordPress and WHMCS or acronyms WHM So it's important to Do a good bit of the work and account management within WHMCS to help keep records in place for each user WHMCS has a lot of blog tracking Based on account management through like creating the profile creating the account on the server any changes to a sign update or contact information change All of that good stuff. So it really becomes a log book of your server and more than that too Something that I think can go overlooked sometimes is that WHMCS can communicate with both WordPress Your WordPress site and WHM in a way that if you're just working and say like WHM It's not communicating back to those other systems That's kind of like the endpoint and so by using WHMCS to do some of this stuff You are not just logging things, but you're actually Making things happen Throughout all three systems rather than just in one particular one. Yeah, absolutely. That is that is a good point for sure So we'll talk through how to set up additional admins at the end of this So that's also really helpful to note that if you're working on your support team You want to make sure to have an admin account for each user So I'll go through just a quick little glimpse of like how even reclaim uses WHMCS for ourselves and tracking through The profile on the as on that side. So I'm gonna switch our little screen share going on right now So you're gonna see a little tunnel super quick of ourselves as I've got the WHMCS profile So first I just have a test account set up on WHMCS server to show what you'll see Now keep in mind. There are two versions of WHMCS You might see some of our newer setups have a more recent version of WHMCS and a lot of our legacy Existing accounts have this view. This is one of the older versions of WHMCS We are in the roadmap talks of updating So you don't need to worry about updating right now, but there are changes coming not any time soon. We're hoping for Not we're in the talks about timelines and all of that stuff, but it is coming So the biggest thing that I would say is looking through the summary page of The WHMCS profile This is really helpful to get a glimpse at the account as a whole to start You can see the information that this will likely have your university address set up You can also see what email address they're using for the particular URL if you need to search For anything you can also see how many products they've got Typically it is one, but we'll talk about cPanel management here in a minute and going through How to add more accounts if needed under the add new order section as well as moving Accounts if needed through the merge merge client accounts Also deleting on client account and this Deleting is one of the last things that you can do We have we recommend that you keep a record of the profile as much as possible if needed But you can delete it if you just want to clean up clean house or anything like that But not recommended You can also click through Quickly to get to like the product or service through the ID number and all the VACA and stuff The notes section will touch on is really helpful to Keep track of if needed the log shows everything from account creation To password changes to the cPanel password change to adding new orders Changing little like contact information if you need to for whatever reason on that side The product service page as well. That will show you The different information about where the account is held The server Is also really helpful if you have a multiple server account Or contract where different students are hosted on different servers It's really helpful to see that way you can narrow down where you need to go if you need to log into whm You'll also get access to the FTP and cPanel username and password. So it's really helpful if a student needs to SSH into their account or FTP into their account This is also where you'll change the primary domain during that process. So we can we can Add that in to the chat as well and then you can see information like registration date and To see when they signed up so you can kind of if you're deep provisioning you can kind of gauge They've been here for four years. So Maybe it's time that we read retire their account and all of that stuff The module commands are also really helpful If you need to for whatever reason the account didn't go through account creation didn't go through you can click create and That will provision the account on WHM and then sync with WHM CS to embed the cPanel in the WordPress dashboard You can also quickly suspend the account if needed. This is helpful if you get like a malware request takedown request or Like a phishing scheme take down requests anything like that or you just need to quickly take a site offline You can click suspend it'll put up a splash page on that side and then on the flip you could do on Suspend to bring the site back online if Your school uses different packages based on the type of user you're working with so like say you have a faculty package or a student package You can change that in WHM CS and then also sync the FTP password with the server on WHM If you click this change pass password module command it will change the password to whatever is listed in the password box here and I think that that particular button is kind of poorly named. I think that you should be named sync password because It's misleading that you're like changing a password really because all it's really doing is repairing that bridge that exists between the systems So it's not it's really not a scary thing to click You're not gonna, you know lock a student out Typically it's used when you're in a situation where For some reason the student can't get into the WordPress admin dashboard, for example, that's on their That's in their cPanel. Usually they can just click on that link from installatron and then be brought right in and signed right into that dashboard. But sometimes that connection can break And so the first thing you want to do I well first thing I like to do is just run that change password because typically that will get everything kind of back Absolutely. And it is important to note that this password is different from their single sign on password too. So if they sign in through their through the main their main WordPress portal. So like in this case, this is a BYU Test account if they signed in to BYU through their their single sign on this password is different than the password they used to sign in If the for whatever reason they see a cPanel login screen after they sign in. This is where you would go to help sync everything back up and then let them see this the cPanel dashboard on that side. So it's really helpful to have A sense of what goes on in this product service page or even just the summary page itself for folks. So definitely take a chance and look through Your WHMCS profile if you need to And let us know if you have any questions in the discord chat. We'll definitely take a look. We'll move into cPanel management. Yeah, so say you want to have one user that has control over not just one cPanel but multiple and you want them to be able to access them easily from their one account. And so we while cPanel doesn't really make this very easy like built in natively to their functionality. We are able to do a work around that we can show you how to do as well as domains admins. So They have the, you know, ability to manage multiple club websites or collaborative research research projects. These might be the case studies Or scenarios that you might find yourself wanting to have a good handle on cPanel management for And we do actually have documentation on this as well. So while we'll take you through step by step here We'll also be sharing in the chat that documentation that is readily available to you. Yeah, absolutely. And our help center is A great resource for that as well. So we'll definitely make sure to share that share all of those and let us know any questions you've got in discord. Right. Okay, so we've gone through the WHM CS overview and talked through different processes that we can go through on cPanel management. So let's actually look at that itself. I am going to switch the screen share again so we can see the profile. So I have my test profile here and I also have Lauren's test profile. I'm going back to the summary page and her and I are working on the example that TLD account within the profiles. So this means that Lauren originally was sharing her cPanel password with me for this account. And it's not necessarily super secure in the sense that we don't want to share passwords with folks. So within the cPanel management sphere, we found a workaround to allow for more than one user to manage the same cPanel. Because cPanel itself doesn't have really great options for multiple users. So in this case, I am going to add a new order on my profile for this example that TLD account. I'm going to go ahead and open up the user profile here or the product profile here just so I can have some information up front for myself. So first, I want to make sure I am copying the username to my clipboard. This is going to be important after we set the order to make sure that both accounts are using the same cPanel username because in the WordPress code we have set up for the dashboard. It tracks based on the cPanel username and then embeds cPanel to that account to that profile based on that from there. So I'm going to just go ahead and copy that. Then I'm also going to just make a note of what the domain name is. And on my profile under the summary page, I'm going to click add a new order. And then you'll see like a little form to fill out. I'm going to first uncheck generate invoice and send email. Most of the time you're working on this through user request so you don't necessarily need to send them an email saying that the order was placed in their name. Also generating an invoice for the user. Most of the time you're not working with any payments or anything like that. So we just want to make sure that that's set. And then we move into the actual product service portion. You're going to click down this dropdown menu and select the package that is specific to your institution and your setup. BYU has a little bit more options, but I'm just going to select the student plan. Most of the time it's going to say something like account or student plan or something like that. Whatever is designated based on your needs for the different packages. And then from there I'm going to type in the domain name that I am working with. In this case, take example.tld. This will also be whatever sub domain the users set up or top level domain that they've registered for the program. Anything like that. We're going to select a free billing cycle this way that they won't get an email for an invoice or anything like that. And we'll be good to go. I'm going to do this just on my end to make things look very similar to how it's going to look on your instance. Most of the time this is going to be zero. No invoice needed. And we're going to submit the order from there. I'll be brought to a confirmation screen where you can see my profile information and the product we just set up. Now this is where we're going to change the cPanel username to the one that Lauren was working with. So I'm going to paste in the cPanel username. The password doesn't really matter right now. We can change that here in a second. I'm going to go over to run module create. I'm going to uncheck this box and uncheck send welcome email. You can send this to folks if you want. I'm not going to worry about that right now. But that's also handy to have for an FTP password if needed. I'm also going to make sure to designate what server the account lives on. So if you have multiple servers within your setup, you just want to take a note of that on the original profile. So here under the server drop down menu. So I'm going to keep that on BYU1 and then I'm going to accept the order. And this is going to push through the account itself. And you'll get a confirmation that it went through successfully. If there's any other error or anything, it will also be displayed in the box here. So once that's done, you're going to go into the shared hosting product itself, which you can just click on the words shared hosting and that will redirect you to the product service tab within the profile. And then from here, if there are any like FTP needs or SSH needs, you can copy the password from the original account and move that into the same password. Scroll down to the bottom of the page and click save changes that will save the box here. And then we're going to use that handy dandy change password module. And I'm going to get an error because I guess the account doesn't exist on the server. But if the account already exists on the server, you're going to make sure that it works. You'll see a green confirmation button there that everything is synced up. So we are good to go there. And this is really handy. So you can do this like five times if you have like a five person group project that you're working with the professor on or like a multi-managed club account for like the fencing club on campus or something like that. But that's really handy. You can set the main administrator like as the project owner. And then you can just add orders to each additional administrator as needed on that side. Something to keep in mind as well that I learned the hard way with this particular process is that in order to check and see if it has worked, it really is only going to work if you go into the user's account through the WordPress dashboard. So if you try to access the C-Panel from the product services page in WHMCS, you're not going to see a difference, a change. But if you go to your Dominated One's own WordPress page and then you switch to user, you should be able to see that dropdown from there. They'll see it fine on their end. Yeah. In mind. Absolutely. For sure. So that's the top screenshot here in this slide. It's down at the bottom left of the dashboard embed. So you can always switch between the profiles. Another thing to note too is to be careful at how fast you're switching between accounts. Sometimes users may run into issues where they go into one C-Panel and then quickly switch into the other one. And the C-Panel passwords kind of get out of sync. So you want to make sure to do that change password if you have anybody reach out about that. So that's really handy. And just be mindful of how fast you're moving through. You can take a couple seconds and then allow the code to regenerate a login token for each user. Okay. So we are working through transferring ownership now that we've talked through adding multiple accounts to folks, user profiles. This is really handy if for whatever reason the project owner has left the college or no longer can maintain the account itself. You can quickly transfer ownership to the new person, new manager of the account itself. So this is really handy. And we'll go through that process. You will see a tunnel. Again, I got to switch my process really quick. So I am in my WHMCS profile that we've been working in in the test instance, except now I have an empty profile. I am taking over ownership from Lauren for example.tld. And we're going to move the product into my account. One thing to note before we get started is this ID number that's up at the top underneath summary. That is going to tell us where the account is and let us move the product into my account. So under this, we're going to click move product and service. You're going to see a little tiny window pop up. I think that's a little bit bigger for y'all. And then you copy the new owner's user ID. So I've done that. My number is 1907. You can also search for the name or email for the person that you're moving to. I typically just have both profiles open in a separate window. A separate tab from each other. And we're going to click transfer after we paste in the client ID. Some information is going to happen in the background and you will automatically be redirected to the person's profile. And then once I go into Lauren's profile, I'm going to search her name again. You will see one less profile or accounts. She had test account and example.tld. But now example.tld is under my name. So it's really quick to move things around. Once that's done, I do typically like to click change password. This profile doesn't exist on the server, so it's not going to show that it went through. Just to make sure that the sync happens and then folks are able to see the cPanel embedded in their WordPress dashboard after they authenticate through SSO. So at that point account ownership is maintained. The main profile isn't going to be removed from the server when you process your terminations or anything like that. So it's really helpful to maintain long-standing projects like that. So if you have like a longer research project, not maybe a couple of years down the line or anything like that, it's helpful to maintain from there. And we'll move into Max Mail and client groups for organization, which is really helpful. Yeah, so this is a great way to be able to easily stay in communication with your user base. And it's particularly helpful for doing things like deprovisioning accounts. You can stay on top of managing your turnover. So you can set up accounts, set up group client groups that are based on projected graduation year. You can set them up based on signup date. And then essentially you're just emailing everyone who is in that group. Yes, yeah, through the mass mail tool. It's also really helpful when you set policies for your deprovisioning process. And Pilot and I will be talking about that tomorrow. So definitely stay tuned for that and we'll kind of work in tandem on both of those. So awesome. Cool. So we'll talk through a little demo on adding a client group to your profile and then sending or setting up a test email for folks as well. So I'm going to be going to see a little tunnel again while I switch my screen. Awesome. Okay, so I was just working in my profile here. And to set the client group, you're going to go to the profile tab on the user entry or user page. And then you're going to see down here at the bottom you're there towards the bottom on the right side. It says client group with a drop down but drop down menu. So you click that and you want to also set the group prior to this. And so I kind of been doing this backwards but I'll set the client group and then we'll go through how to add them just so you do that first and then you can set the client group. So I've got a reclaim hosting group set up here. So I'm going to select that and scroll down and click save changes on the profile. This will confirm that the group is set and you'll see a green changes saved successfully message, which is awesome. I'm also going to do this to Warren's profile just so we have more than one person in the group on that side. And that is saved. Awesome. So now that the client groups are set, I'm going to roll us back two steps and show you how to set up the client group. That is under the setup menu towards the bottom under client groups and that will bring up a list of any active ones you have. So in this case it's a sample group. We've got some email reminder groups set up for BYU in particular and support notifications. So this is really helpful if you're doing like the paid model with students who are pying domain top level domains or anything like that. You can get notified when they renew their account or anything on that side, but a lot of times we use this for email notifications to create a new one. You can just add your own particular name, whatever you want to call it like graduation 2013 2023 and on 2013. Wow, 10 years in advance. You can set the graduation year you can set maybe you want to designate faculty versus students on that side so you can you can name this whatever you want. You can also designate based on color. It doesn't really matter, but it's also helpful to see within a list of accounts. You don't need to worry about any of the discounts suspend terminate you can designate that if you'd like for the suspend terminate and then invoicing. You don't really need to worry about invoicing as well. And when you're ready to create it you just click save changes. And it's all good there. Awesome. So that is client groups. Once you designate the client group for each person it is a little bit of a manual process where you have to go into each user and select the group itself. You can go into the mass mail tool, which is under clients and down at the bottom under mass mail tools. At that point you can select the message type which is a general email. I typically do this when I'm working with the mass mail tool and then you can filter based on client group. So this is really handy when you're talking through deep provisioning processes like if your user is graduating you can give them six months before or whatever you want to set. And throughout the process you can send them a reminder email. So I'm going to select the, I don't see reclaim. Let me refresh my page because I think I made the group after I opened this page up so it should be there. Yes. So now I see the reclaim hosting group. I'm going to select it. You can also select more than one group. So if you hold down your control key or your command key and click, you can select more than one group. I'm just going to select the one group and then click compose message. And it will show you in this recipient box how many emails you're going to send. Perfect to know how many users you have in that group in particular or anything like that. So I just have to myself and Lauren and then I'm going to, you can type out your own message templates, anything like that. And then you can send the message. This is perfect for those account reminder emails, like I said, and it processes through each email every 10 seconds or so. So that's really helpful on that side. Awesome. So that is mass mail tools and we're going to work through in client groups too. So we're going to work through administrator notes now. Yes. So these are really handy. We use them at every claim all the time just on our end. As Meredith says here, they are your friend. It helps you do things like track the backstory of a project so you can just set these little reminders of what has been going on. You can link to we'd like to link to specific tickets, but you know if you want to link to specific, you know, threads. It can, you know, be helpful to say it provide details like what application they're working with the type of project. And it is also completely customizable to your domain needs. And there's also the option to make it sticky or important and that's really helpful because then you're not you don't have to go into that notes tab specifically. But you can set it so that whenever you go to that user's profile, it's just right at the top as shown in that second screenshot there. Absolutely. And they're really helpful for. I train of thought is out the window. Wow. You can talk through like if this is a research project or if it's a club group or anything like that the sticky note will also help designate the type of profile as well which is just really helpful for that as well. Awesome. And we're on to admins. So if you wanted to add more admins to your port portal, you can do that by essentially following what's on the screenshots here. Adding more admins will allow more people to manage and access account action items. It'll allow you to have more people in control of things like creating new accounts and terminating accounts. So as you can see in the first screenshot, you would go to set up staff management administrator user users. And I believe that that is kind of is the old setup for WHMCS. Well screenshot below shows if you have the newer version of WHMCS, you would be going to that manage admins tab which is under which of those icons Meredith. I believe it's the wrench looking icon on that side. I just wanted to designate both versions of WHMCS because this process does change in upgrades. And so we'll have documentation on that and update documentation when needed for those. But I highly, highly recommend that your team makes admin accounts in WHMCS. You're going to have a separate admin account as well as their own account on the server itself. So if they have their own portfolio or projects that they're working on for their classes and that sort of thing, those the admin accounts are interchangeable or the admin and user accounts are separate in that sense. So you're able to manage the domain of one's own account there. And this way, you're not relying on one person in particular to do a specific action within WHMCS. Reclaim has their own admin users. So we definitely recommend that you keep that admin there so we can go in and troubleshoot with you with folks if needed. And the admins are always going to be a good option on that side. So we are, I think, almost done. I added some additional resources to our documentation and our help center. So I'll post the slides in Discord. So feel free to take a look through our WHMCS in depth options, changing account ownership, which we can talk through in Discord as well. And then cPanel management, which is that user option from there. And as kind of a follow up, final thoughts wrap up. cPanel management is also really great for more than one account project or managing more than one account within their profile. If needed, you can do this on a case by case basis on that side. Client groups and mass mail will also be really helpful for organizing accounts and quickly sending out mass communication to folks. And the notes and additional admins helps you organize behind the scenes as well for greater efficiency in the support side, which I'm all about all the time for sure. So, yeah. Awesome. Well, cool. We'll keep the conversation going in Discord and we'll talk there. It was great to talk with you, Amanda. You too, Meredith. And we'll see you all on the flip. See ya.