 I'm going to work on ready and get back to business. The business. Tim, oh. Jokes that only we could get. Good grief. All right. Perfect. So that what Jim just talked about was sort of a broad overview. And then what I want to do now is start to really deep dive specifically into WHMCS and WHM. Because I feel like most of us are comfortable in WordPress. And if you've already been managing your system, you're probably doing a lot of switching users getting into their C panel. But WHMCS might be a whole new world for you. Like there have been times I think even in training where I don't even focus all that much on it. And I'm changing a lot of that now because there is a lot of functionality in there. And then WHM as well, sort of that higher level overview sitting on top of those actual C panel accounts. So I want to go in depth into more of those tools that are available in there because there is a lot of information in different places, a lot of it's duplicated. And so you'll find logging into C panel, you might find in multiple places where to find user names and all that. But there's different places to find that kind of stuff. So this is the home page of WHMCS. When you first log in, you'll see things like pending orders. And like Jim mentioned, you see a lot of billing information that really just doesn't apply unless there's paid domain registrations happening in there or things like that. So the first thing I want to look at is clients. And so from that dropdown menu, I'm going to go to view search clients. One thing to note about WHMCS is you're going to have way more clients than actual users in your system. Like from day one, because anybody who logs in to your WordPress install, a client account is created in here. It's an empty one. They have no products. They have no information or anything. But there's an empty client account. And that's because in the WordPress system, when they first log in, in order to embed that sign-up form, we're sort of doing a single sign-on with WHMCS. So it's creating a client account for them and logging them in so that those two are connected. So what you'll have in here are people that have logged in like Edwin here, but under services, 00. So this means zero products, zero domains. You'll have a lot of those, most likely, because you'll have people logging in with single sign-on. Your entire campus has the ability to log in. But A, you might have restricted the ability to actually sign up for a domain. Or B, you'll just have people who go to do something and then as soon as they get to the sign-up, they're like, I'm not ready yet. I saw that domain form and I'm like, I just actually don't want to do that just yet. And so you'll have quite a few users like that. And this is where there's usually a cron job that will run regularly. A cron job just runs like every night and says, do they have any accounts? If not, set their status to inactive. So this status field refers to that. Do they have any active products in their account? If you were to terminate someone's account the next time that thing ran, it would push them back to inactive. So that's an example of that. And so you'll have a lot more here. 1,940, there are not over almost 2,000 accounts on state use server. There's only a couple hundred. You can see it gives some basic information, but clicking on a specific ID number in here, and this is an interface that you'll see a lot in WHMCS, is this sort of tabular view like this. And so clicking on the ID number actually takes you into that person's account. It's a little weird, but let's go into Jim's to go back to his. As Jim mentioned, the first page just has a lot of overview information about their profile. So you have their contact information here, but there's some interesting things in here as well. One thing is that I could see the last time that they logged in. And so we've got a date and time stamp there. We can see their IP address. That is useful for us actually. We use that a lot with our external clients when they logged in to see like if they're on a wireless network and it's blocked for some reason. So if they have an IP address here, I'll look and see like if they're contacting me and this has been updated that day, I might reasonably be able to guess. Well, let me just double check that IP address rather than asking them what is their IP to unblock them for a firewall or something like that. So that's just some useful information here when they signed up, basic information like that. You can see a list of most recent emails. I think this shows like five by default, something like that. So if they have been getting a lot of emails for whatever reason, and like I said, WHMCS in Domain of One's Own doesn't send a whole lot of emails and it sends the welcome email. But beyond that, we've turned most of it off because it's things like domain renewal reminders or your account has been suspended, a lot more automated stuff. This is hosting automation software, but in Domain of One's Own, beyond the actual provisioning step, there's not a whole lot of automation happening in the background because they're free accounts that live until you decide that they shouldn't. But you'll be able to see the recent emails there and you can actually click right in here that will open up the actual email as well. So a quick way to get to that. View orders as useful. Jim mentioned, let's say an order didn't go through for some reason. If I clicked View Orders here, it's going to come to a page that will actually show me the domain that they signed up for when they signed up for it. And I would actually see here, for example, it would say setting up a username, password, which server it's going on that it would be incomplete right here. And if I tried to accept this, it would try again to provision that account. So if they're trying to log in and they're getting a blank white screen or something, a good thing to check is, did this order go through? And it's a little misleading because the status here says pending, but this worked. Like this account got set up, Jim C. Panel was embedding, and everything was fine. It's just pending because it hasn't been accepted yet. It's pretty common, even on Reclaim Hosting on our main WHMCS install that we don't get around accepting orders for a while. So sometimes you'll have pending orders just sitting there. It's not hurting anything. However, if it's pending and here you don't, so this one, it's a little hard to see because I don't have an example that didn't go through for some reason. But you would see down here that it was trying to provision account. It didn't work. And if I hit accept, it would actually come up with whatever error message that we ran into. Some things errors that I've seen before are like C. Panel doesn't allow any domains to start with the word test. That's a popular thing for people who are testing out systems to use as test domain dot whatever for your subdomain and C. Panel balks at that. They don't like the word test to be the first word. It's just one of their rules. And so they'll go to sign up. Well, WHMCS doesn't have that rule. They don't really care. And so WHMCS will try to process it through and then they'll get a white screen. WHMCS will just be sitting here with a password. But if you hit accept order, you get a nice error message up here that says system account test not allowed in valid username, something like that. And so it gives you a little bit more information to go on. I mentioned earlier I've seen a similar issue like with passwords. If the automatic password that WHMCS generated wasn't secure enough for some reason. So that gives us a lot of information in there. Yeah. Sure. Which is only going to apply for domain registrations. But yeah, if any of the contact information isn't correct enough for a domain registration to go through, like they're very careful about zip codes matching states and all this kind of stuff. And so it's got to be, you know, really perfect. But this will give you a lot more information. So if you have someone who it's not embedding, the first thing to check is did their order go through, go up into their order, try to accept it, see if you get any error messages there. If it went through and the accounts actually created, then it could be something else. It could be a password issue or something not syncing properly. So jam your laptop. Struggle wasn't. Or maybe it's the Internet. Who knows. No. Sorry. It's a personal subject. So Jim mentioned emails going out and I'm going to show you some templates that can be created in the system. But this is a quick way to send emails. You can actually even just send emails to them directly from within WHMCS if you want to. I don't know why you wouldn't want to use it from your own client, but maybe you want it to be tracked within the system. That would be a good reason to. If you want it to actually show up down here, communications that you've had with the user, it's only going to show the outgoing stuff. If they respond, it might go to your support address or whatever is set up in the system. But you can absolutely click go on a new message and it'll pull up basically a dummy down here. So that's the web mail version of creating an email. We'll look at some other stuff. There are ways in WHMCS where you can send mass mail out to all of your accounts. You can filter that by criteria. You can say all accounts that are active, obviously versus everybody that's logged in and that kind of thing. Or everybody that's got a top level domain registration or what have you. Let's go right through on some of the profile that we're going to be talking about. We're going to be talking about the FTP information. The FTP information is really important. It's in there. It's encrypted in the database, but this is the actual account information. You can test those credentials. This is sometimes what we see if C panel is not embedding properly. You want to make sure that the FTP information is not embedded properly. You want to make sure that WHMCS has the right information to be able to embed C panel. It's basically trying to remotely authenticate that user. You want to make sure things are matching up in the system, essentially. We'll do that. If somebody reaches out and needs FTP information, you can resend that email. You can also look in here and get their information and do some testing directly on your own with an FTP client. Something like that. Jim mentioned some of these module commands. It's a great thing. It's kind of weird, but let's say I wanted to change Jim's FTP account emails me and goes, I don't know what the hell that is. It gave me a break. Can you please make it, Jim Groom is awesome, and you're like, that's not really a secure password, but whatever. I'll allow it. It's a great one. Let's say I went there and I saved those changes. The changes have been saved. That did not change the password. This seems really weird, but this is nothing but a database. This is an entry in their database saying what that account should be, but it hasn't communicated that with C panel. It seems completely counterintuitive, but until I hit this change password button here, that's going to actually send the change password command and take whatever is in this field and actually so WHMCS acts a little weird in that regard because it's really more of a client management software and a database that holds all of this information, but it does need to communicate back and forth with the server and there's some times where you feel like you have to do more than one step to do various things. Service password changed successfully. Now that is the new FTP account information for that user. It didn't come back with any error and so we're good and those C panels, so we're good on that. That's right. Right. If they're logging into sites that they're not even dealing with these login credentials at all. You might also double check and make sure that things are synced up if it's not embedding C panel properly for some reason. You might say, well, let's try changing it or whatever. If they changed it on their own and WHMCS has old information for some reason, that's something very occasionally. So that's another thing to check. Just hit that button. Just to make sure that yeah. Right. Yes. Yeah. They are. So there's a lot of different items. You've got a client status, you've got an order status and you've got a product status. Almost everything has a status assigned to it while the order was still pending, but we have it set up in your system to where you don't have to necessarily accept orders in order for them to go through. We tell it to automatically set up C panel. So for the purposes of this, this C panel account is active. It got created as soon as Jim hit the register button. Everything went through, but the orders just sit there as pending. That's correct. Yes. Every order, you'll never have inactive accounts if they put in an order. You shouldn't anyway, because inactive accounts should really mean they don't have anything yet. So I mean, we'd have to really. Okay. Yeah. And we can double check on that, but essentially pending every single order that comes in is going to be pending until it's accepted. You can accept it or they can send it there. Honestly, I mean, I've got some systems where since it's started, you might have 400 accounts orders in there, but they're generated automatically. And so, you know, you're good. Yeah. So the system is meant to be self-service. So it's just a weird quirk of WHMCS that all orders are pending until they're accepted, but we have it set up in the system to where you don't necessarily have to accept an order for it to go through because you don't have to accept it. So yeah, you've got a couple different buttons down here, change packages. I could suspend an account. Let's say, you know, someone graduated, I'm going here and doing some cleanup and I'm like, Jim's not supposed to be in here, but I'm going to reach out to him. And so I don't want to necessarily delete his stuff yet. I'll reach out to him, but this shouldn't be online. Let's say somebody contacts you with copyright information or whatever, you need to be there. Now that it's suspended, if I were to open up this domain, Cpanel will give us the account suspended message in there. And so then you can follow up with the user, but it hasn't actually touched any other information. All the databases are there, all the installs, if you unsuspend it, everything comes back online. So it's a nice option if you just need something to be offline for a period of time. It's a great option if you're setting up policies and you're not going to be able to do anything. If someone graduates, we'll give them three months, then maybe we suspend their accounts and give them another three months because they may not be checking email, but they might be checking their domain. They go here and they get this message, then they might be like, yeah, what's going on? And it's like, yeah, you graduated. I had a student from Mary Washington contact me on Facebook. This is my life now. So my domain's not working. I was like, yeah, look at it. And I'm like, you were in the list that they removed your accounts. He was like, oh, I guess that's right. I graduated last spring a year ago, but I used my domain professionally. And I'm like, well, you got to move on and take ownership of it. So yeah, situations like that. But you might set up something where it's suspended for a period of time because they are checking their website, maybe not necessarily their emails. Maybe they graduate and they don't have access to their email anymore. So this is one of the only ways that they'll notice that that's happening and reach out to you. Yeah. Right. Right. They're still going to show up active in WordPress. We haven't made the WordPress portal to where you can do everything in there. Yeah. Yeah, I like yeah, I like using the HMCS, HMCS is sort of my management tool for a lot of things when it comes to managing accounts and clients and that kind of stuff in the system. Not at all. Nope. You're a single sign on. The only thing that it's happening is they're being sent off to single sign on and logging in and it comes back and it's matching up with their email address with their WordPress profile. So the only time we see single sign on break is if someone gets married and their last name changes or they get some schools for whatever reason allow students to change their email addresses just because they want to. BYU would be one of those and so like suddenly they go to log in and they're getting a domain sign up form again and they're like, this makes no sense because it looks like the IFNU user here. It's a different email address. So WordPress, WHMCS, a lot of these rely on the email as the unique identifier which isn't a perfect word but it is what it is. We're getting into the data coming so you can match to this. Yes. Absolutely. There are scripts that you can run to do it. We also, I'll just mention right off the game, we'll be talking about exit strategies a little bit but for a lot of our schools you can just throw us a CSV file and we'll manage some of that for you. So if you put the policies in place, you can just send us a CSV file every semester or however often you want it to be and say these are the accounts that need to be suspended, these are the ones that need to be terminated. That might be a good way of rolling students off is just set those policies in place and then you just hand us the list of accounts and we manage some of that for you. One of my long-term development goals is to hopefully create more interfaces to allow that stuff to be user serviceable as well so that you could just upload a CSV and have it do it automatic but with automation comes danger, right? Sometimes it never hurts to say let's have Reclaim do that rather than terminate every account on accident because I missed the comma. Yeah. The hard thing with integrating with those systems, there's a couple different reasons in which we haven't gone down that path. One is that schools hate to give that information to vendors. It opens up a whole new ball of wax for them to say now Reclaim knows who are active and inactive students are and that kind of thing and who's graduated and who hasn't. Single sign-on is a lot easier to get them off to their server to do that whereas in order to get that information, I've got to communicate and actually store that and know, okay, they graduate on this date and that and then every school system is different. Some are using Banner, some are using Fisher, some are using something else and it really does require that you do custom code for every single one of them. So for now, the way we handle it is just doing batch stuff with CSV files and we can give you the reports of all the accounts that you have that the IT department has some way to say these are the ones that are no longer with us. Jim already mentioned the resending the product welcome so I won't go too much into that. I want to look emails we've mentioned as well. Let's talk a little bit more about that log because logging is really important in WHMCS I found. I've taken a couple actions on Jim's account already and so you'll notice here this isn't just the emails that went out or anything like that. It's something that WHMCS has done. So this is when I suspended it. This is when it was unsuspended. This is who did that. So if you want to set up more than one administrator, it might be a good idea to not share those accounts because then you can track who did what. So it might be nice to be able to say okay it wasn't me, it was that person who terminated the account. I can follow up with them and say what happened there? Why did you do that? Was that a mistake or something like that? If you're sharing your own WHMCS log in, it's going to be the same user for everything like it says here with reclaim even though some of this stuff Jim did, some I did. The only time you'll see it differently go... I don't know, it's even using the reclaim account for the initial order placement stuff. So yeah, you'll see in here new order was placed, created an invoice, marked it as paid because it's a $0 invoice and that's an example where we don't send emails for everything. They're not going to get a $0 invoice to their email account so we have a lot of those emails turned off in there. It was successful, it was able to create that C-Penal account and this is the service ID which is the product for that user. Email was sent to Jim, he re-sent the email to himself, password was changed by me, we suspended it so you can really get a full picture of all activity that's happened on that account within WHMCS. We can but nothing has, the last thing I did was unsuspend the account. Don't be going in my systems, I'll cut your access off. Wow. Mo Peltzel terminated Jim's account. This gets dangerous so yeah absolutely, so here's a perfect example you can see IP addresses were they on the same network which they were and that kind of thing so this is a great overview of what's happened. If somebody went to set up a C-Penal account never got set up properly the log should absolutely say not only that it didn't get set up properly but this will throw the exact error messages that C-Penal sent back to WHMCS so if you're not seeing it anywhere else you should see it in the log here. It's going to be a tab for each individual user so if you're sitting at the summary and because my screen's a little bit shorter I'm not seeing everything so I have to hit that if I had a nice big screen these would be more tabs here so as you get smaller it comes to this dropdown this is the log for the individual user WHMCS does have an activity log for everything under utilities logs, activity log this gets really noisy because this is everything that's happened on the system so right now we're just working on Jim's account but this is every account that's in the system everything that's been happening, new orders being placed all that, that's all within here and you can search on that under utilities logs, activity log so right there and so you can search by specific dates, specific user names I could see just the stuff that I've been doing in my account so this is weird terminology but for WHMCS domains are top level domains systems.net.org those kind of things subdomains are not a domain to WHMCS because it doesn't have to manage stuff like that it doesn't have to register it with some third party or do anything so you'll just have a product, a hosting account that's because Reclaim has our own billing system, our own WHMCS so we have access to it no because we keep the system separate so yeah it's because they're going to ReclaimHosting.com to buy something, they're going to be in our billing system and your stuff's just going to be the stuff that you all manage where I would add that is in WordPress and then you would give them the non-single sign on link to get into the site so if they're outside of Brimmar you're going to give them the wp-login.php but you're going to create a manual WordPress account and the first time they log in, WHMCS will create a profile for them and that connection will happen automatically in the background so as long as they can get into WordPress press everything else can happen automatically if they're outside your university and actually this is a good move forward to my attention one of the things to think about we talk about WHMCS and usually logging WHMCS happens at your domain slash manage slash WHMCS so we have a very kind of systematic way to set up where WHMCS lives and if you want to get to the WHM server that's usually your school name dot mclanghosting.com colon2087 so I didn't even mention that when we talked about it but every system has a pretty kind of standard URL we use so cogate.mclanghosting.com colon2087 will get you into WHM for example cogate.domains slash manage slash WHMCS those are all pretty standard how you would get into so I didn't mention that but I just wanted to reiterate there are if you're like let us know let's look at some other tools that are available not just from the individual user's profile but as a whole here so you've got products and services shared hosting, shared hosting is going to be those hosting accounts WHMCS has the capability to do a whole lot more with other systems but this is the only thing shared hosting that you're going to do so this is every hosting account on the system as well as their statuses so canceled means that those were terminated we changed their status to canceled after their trial is up on state U for example you'll have a lot of active accounts in here if you do have graduates that you've eventually terminated you might have statuses in there I can filter this if I want to so if I want to say I really only just want to see active I can filter based on that and now I'm only seeing active accounts in there or I could search for a specific one so I could say client name and this search will work you know even if it's oh jeez do I have to go with the full oh he's not active that's why I didn't find it so that's right I've already terminated you so I was like yeah so if I just search the last name I can search by the domain name so the search works really well in there so in this context pending means the account did not get created because we're talking about products here and not orders so if a product is pending most likely their C-Penal account did not get created for some reason and it's just sitting there so that's where you would want to go in and try to create it and see if there's something like that maybe you pushed it through manually outside of WHMCS and so the status in WHMCS just hasn't been updated but I like to work mostly in WHMCS just to make sure that things are active in terminology is this order right you're right the order the status of the product is pending but if you even look above at the top 142 pending orders this is where Tim said everything that comes through is in order and when you log in through WHMCS you might see right away 400 pending orders it doesn't matter they're just orders that are sitting there if you can make them active or not it's the product whether it's active or pending or inactive or terminating that matter but do that service there when the service the number of services where are you seeing the number oh it's out of the clients it's out of the clients so this is just the quick speak for WHMCS to be how many hosting accounts and how many domains they have usually you'll see one zero that's what the majority of your users should be that's right yeah so go into their ID and you should see they maybe like there was a typo or something and that's where you would want to follow up and go which of these is the correct one yeah so it looks like she got more than one domain but one hosting account so yeah and it may be that like she hit the back button somewhere and then more than one thing got added to the card or something so yeah they will either see a white page or a cPanel login that said they could not log in so it'll be one of those two depending on the code this essentially means how many hosting accounts and domains do we have in the system that's what they consider services and how many are active so you can still terminate an account and it will still be there but in WHMCS what would happen when it terminates the account it will no longer be on WHM it will no longer be an account on the cPanel server but there still will be a record of it on WHMCS one thing to pinpoint out is WHMCS don't delete those records because they become a record through your school to track what happens to a particular account so keep that and use that as much as possible as you get more people going through and time passes you won't remember so that's getting your place to track that in terms of your licensing and stuff like that we're not looking at any numbers in WHMCS we're looking at active hosting accounts on the server so WHMCS is your history of everything that happened if someone graduated you had to terminate their account keep it all in here so that you're able to if you later want to follow up with those users or something you've got that data if you need to find out if somebody says I've had people who graduated and then six months later they went to work for the university and something got lost in the mix then their account got deactivated or something you want to have that paper trail there to be able to go back to what might have happened we had one school who was as they were graduating and leaving they would just delete these clients from WHMCS well at that point you have no information to go off of that could be even if the domain was still active somewhere and the hosting account was online you wouldn't really have the tools to know where it was living, is it on your server did they move to reclaim what's going on I wouldn't delete a whole lot of stuff in WHMCS there's no commands to suspend and terminate and it's communicating with those external systems but leaving the stuff here is good correct, yeah suspended it's still taking up space yes, because all the data still lives on the server suspended just means I want it to be offline so I want them to get an error message of some kind when they go to the website but if I need to bring it back online it's a one-click button to unsuspend eventually one absolutely, yeah it's usually a good process to do two steps suspend and then terminate just so, you know, it's easier if there was an error for any reason to unsuspend versus having to pull a backup or hope there's a backup or something like that and be in those situations so Tim, I see okay so WHM doesn't talk back to WHMCS so what happened there is somebody suspended in WHM and didn't know about this system at all WHMCS is just assuming things are still punky-dory but yeah, so so what this is is a create a backup somebody checks to see whether this is legitimate so they suspend that what's the bet and maybe this is a question for your comment thinking about what the best way is to create that account so that doesn't get suspended or maybe you just have to do it that way I'm going to go away and reset it anyway so maybe the best way to create the account then reset it for the next time so it's available as a faculty field and choose your domain right, yeah, absolutely and I think the key thing there is most of the work you want to be doing is actually in WHMCS because that can communicate out and do stuff versus doing it in WHM it is, yeah there's a lot there but there's a lot actually once you get into WHMCS there's actually a lot you can ignore because it does way more than we even need to take advantage of for our purposes but yeah, because it actually would only be a few clicks for me to cancel an order and then delete an order and that terminates the hosting account and the next time you log in you get to sign up again and so, yeah if I went to that view order screen canceling it would actually cancel out that order and then deleting it would remove it and that actually runs the terminate commands for you and everything so it's a quick process to basically reset an account so that they get the sign up again next time there's a mass mail tool in here I mentioned previously, let's say you want to send an email out to all of your active users, this is a great way to do it one thing that I really like as a feature of this not only can you filter by certain things before you compose the message but it will also like send out 25 at a time so you don't like get seen as a spammer 500 emails and the first you know, the first 100 go through and then you get 400 bounce backs into your email appliance so it's kind of useful for that but let's say I wanted to go in here and I want to send an email to only people who have active products so I can do that I'll do, this has more than one type of product service these are different hosting plans you probably just have one we want their hosting account to be active and even if they have more than one hosting account we're just going to do one so if I go here to compose a message you can see it's going to send this to 320 people who is this guy yeah I know right so it's going to send it to 320 people I can choose a subject, here's what's great about this so it's not the best web mail client in the world you know in terms of composing a message but we have mail merge fields and you can pull stuff you can pull their client information first and last name you can pull their domain name so you can say hey Tim I noticed that your domain is a year old and that kind of something you can actually put the actual information for themselves in there so you can drop any of these merge tags directly into the email and it will replace it with the specific information for that user so kind of a useful tool and again those emails that you're then sending out are logged in WHMCS so it's a good tool for communicating out to your user base in general probably one of the better tools versus I don't think WHM has anything and WordPress you'd have to add third-party plugins to do mass mailing and it just doesn't handle it really well so and you can see here there's those settings send 25 emails every 30 seconds so it kind of exactly yeah WordPress no WordPress again is going to be where you've got everybody who ever logged in and so WHMCS actually knows who's got hosting accounts who's active in my system and who's not you don't okay maybe we didn't give you all the permissions yeah this is under clients mass mail tool so clients mass mail tool I'll go back here so the first thing you have to do is build out what kind of email you want to send so you get this first and then once you go to compose a message then it gives you the options they're not underneath here okay yeah we can definitely take a look at that so another thing that I want to another thing I want to look at in here is reporting again a lot of reporting is going to be billing related you're going to see stuff like income forecasting and that kind of thing you can ignore some of that where it does hold up really well is if you just need a CSV file of all of your hosting accounts or something you can go down here under exports so and this is under reports more so I skip all of the ones that they've created since it's more income related if you go to more you get all the reports that they have and so there's clients domains I'm not doing top level domains these are all subdomains I can ignore that but services is another one so let's say I need a CSV file that's going to give me every active hosting account in the system so there are other places I could probably get it but I'm going to do it in here so I'm going to do an export of services and I can choose what fields that I want to have in here so I want my CSV file to have the client's name I want it to have their domain name which in this context is going to be like the subdomains and maybe their username and password for whatever reason and I'll filter it based on their status being active so I'll only get active there this gives me a CSV file of exactly what I wanted username's passwords the actual domain names and if I scroll down to the bottom or wait is it at the top where's my save button all the way up there export to CSV sorry it's up at the top they moved it it used to be at the bottom of the page but you got the tools export to CSV and I can grab that as a file so if you need a CSV file with specific information that can be a useful way to do it if you just need client account information email addresses first and last name for anybody who is active in your system that would be a good way to do that this is under reports more so this that will give you all the reports in the system and at the bottom you have exports for clients and services are the two that you're going to use mostly so at the bottom you get a services yes yeah if you're dealing with hosting accounts you're going to do services if you're dealing with user information clients is probably going to be the best there so again WHMCS is top level domain registrations when they say domains for the most part yep that would be their FTP information other utilities that are in here I mentioned logs activity log is going to be the big one that will show you every log every activity that's happened on the server CPL WHM import is kind of interesting let's say like you have been creating some accounts in WHM or you kind of want to see whether or not there's any discrepancies in there I like this because it will communicate with your server and say are there any accounts that exist there that don't exist here or vice versa so if I click get account list I've only got one server so this drop down is just a single one but if I click get account list all of these accounts are on the server but it color codes a couple of them and all the way at the bottom it's got the legend here and so it will indicate once this gets down here which ones have different products on the server than what's on WHMCS which ones don't even exist in WHMCS and they do on the server so if there's any discrepancies it's going to show it in here so this can be a kind of nice way to see this list is coming directly from your server what exists on your server versus what's in WHMCS and there may be for whatever reason some discrepancies these color codes are just that the hosting accounts been changed on the server directly for some reason the last thing and then I'm going to jump off of WHMCS is email templates we talked a little bit about emails the hosting account welcome email is by default the only email that we set up for you and it just contains basic information welcome to the project you can customize those but you can customize others as well so you'll see these in here the ones that are grayed out with the next are disabled and so you'll see a whole lot of disabled stuff in here if I go to this hosting account welcome email and click on it I can actually edit that template and this interface is going to be very similar to that mass mail tool you'll have those merge tags that you can use you can very much customize it depending on the type of email now you're not here's where it's an interesting thing if you're creating a product email you're not going to be able to get certain types of information all the emails can get client information but if you're creating a client email you're not going to know what hosting accounts or domains they have and that kind of thing so you may have a different list of the merge tags at the bottom here depending on the type of email but for the most part product emails are the most useful ones those are going to show up in the dropdown under the product tab those are going to have the information like their domain, the status on it when they signed up information like that so this is the account that goes out the email that goes out and you can see congratulations service domain is now live you see the merge tags for the individual stuff and this is replaced with the actual information I can edit this to it's coming from I can add CCs to it if you want to CC someone else on all those emails I have one school where the guy likes to get an email every time someone signs up don't ask me why but you can do that kind of stuff so you can do that you can also create your own templates now keep in mind creating a template doesn't mean it's going to be automated in any fashion so you can create a migration email but WHMCS isn't going to like the migration process but if you have the template in there then you can use the mass mail tool to say I want you to use my migration template and send it to these 500 people and it will still fill out everything so if you are going to reuse stuff create a template for it anyway so that's right up here at the top you choose what type of email like I said product service is probably going to be the best one general messages mostly just get client information they don't get product information trial ended since we're on state U same interface now but the email is blank and I can start filling it out and I've got all these tags that I can use to build that out and once I've created that that will be in the drop down on the product tab for the individual user I can send that email directly to one person it will be available in the mass mail tool as a template that I can send to multiple people so good option there to customize both the existing emails that you have and create new ones for folks yes do you have email users reply to that WHMCS is never going to see those because WHMCS doesn't receive email so it's going to be the individual client so I would usually best practice there is going to be to set up a group mail box that you're connecting to but it's using IMAP or something so that more than one person could potentially connect to it I've got some people who will use a forwarder so it goes to multiple people or they're managing it in ways like that it happens outside of the system because it's not receiving the email back it's not as good as sort of a general purpose support tool in that sense right now that's right yeah and most of our schools will set it up to the email it's coming from it's something to where the email is coming back will either go to the help desk or the project manager or a group so and you might set up support at wittier.domains or something like that and then have those emails forward it on to who it needs to go to so that there's some central email that's not your own and then if you leave the university for whatever reason then you've got to people start responding to emails a year later something like that it happens so other questions before we move on from WHMCS good questions let's look back so I think the situation with that is WHMCS in newer versions has added more templates and we disabled all of them but then when they add new ones those are active however they're probably not being sent unless there's any particular notification notifications is a new feature of WHMCS in more recent versions so yeah I mean you could disable it if you want to I'm not sure off the bat what that notification does I think there's a general purpose notification system that allows you to get an email when X happens let's say an order fails or you know like it's it's actually a nice system but I haven't played with it much yet if you want to get messages to slack every time you get a new order they now have built-in ways to do that and so it's a whole notification system where it's almost like an if this then that kind of thing and so that email template is probably a general purpose when it needs to send a notification via email what should that email include so let's say I have a 2-3 minute break so you can recycle the brain then we're going to start the WHM that's right