 Hey everyone, and welcome back to the next session of the workshop for Domains 101. Today or now, I guess we're going to be covering a deeper dive into WHMCS, which is one of three systems that make up domain of one zone. And I also just have to say I never get tired of those intros. I'm kind of always dancing behind the scenes. It's going to be stuck in my head for a long time. So over the course of today, we've really covered, we've done a system overview. We've looked close at WordPress and how that's embedded with Cpanel. We've also looked at the Cpanel server where we can make customizations to Cpanel specifically. Now, we're going to look at WHMCS, which is kind of a mouthful. WHMCS stands for Web Host Manager Client Solution. See, I just looked it up and I always forget. I only remembered it because I was looking at it and it says copyright at WHM Complete Solution at the very bottom. I was like, wow, that's okay. I'm so happy for them. I always think it is like copyrighted it. It's unfortunately not a very complete solution. What you need to know about WHMCS is two things. The first, we mentioned this earlier, but WHMCS is what is automatically provisioning Cpanel in the background when your users are signing up for an account. When you see that 10, 9, 8 countdown during sign up, that's WHMCS saying, hey, create a Cpanel account for this person and push it to the server. That's number one. Number two, it's going to become helpful over time as a record book for you as admins to keep track or define usage over time. Defining usage is tricky. That can mean many things. We're not going to sit here and say that WHMCS is going to check every box for you as you're trying to assess domain of one zone over time, but it does give us some really helpful insight into how it's being used, how people are signing up. If someone has received an account welcome email, why someone might have had to be suspended or terminated and when that happened. While in WHM, the server, we're really culling through those accounts regularly to keep the server healthy, to keep those numbers maintained. WHMCS is a nice record over time. Just keep that in mind. You don't have to really delete anything here. This is also where we are going to keep everything in sync. We saw those terminate and suspend buttons in WHM, but we don't want to click them there because that's not going to stay in sync with what WordPress sees. I'm going to try and make sense of that now. I'm going to share my screen here. We're going to look into the WHMCS dashboard. Right now, as before, I am using a stateu.org demo dashboard. Yours might look a little bit different. It's also worth noting that WHMCS has a couple versions out right now. You might have a slightly lower version or you might be completely up to date. Both are going to function completely fine. Just know that there might be some small visual changes. If you have any questions about where to go to locate something, everything's documented. We'll make sure and share it in Discord. Starting here, this is what you're going to see when you first log on. By default, WHMCS is a billing software, which is not how we use it. All of the billing invoices, quotes, billable items, all that jargon can really be disregarded. It is not important to us. Overdue, invoices, credit card, just try to ignore that. What's really going to be important for us is the view slash search clients. Clients for WHMCS are the users that are signing up for accounts. This is going to be helpful, like I said, over time, as your users are logging in and authenticating with single sign-on and then also creating accounts. You can see right here, there's a services column. If someone has an active C-panel account, that's going to show a one here. If it says zero, that means maybe they logged in, but they never signed up for an account. Again, we can use these statuses to help us decipher where people are in the process of interacting with domains. For now, I'm going to focus on a particular user, Mr. Jim Groom. Thank you. His client profile. Again, this is how WHMCS calls certain things. We'll talk about that here in a second. On the summary tab, again, disregard a lot of the invoice and billing stuff. What's going to be really helpful here is this other information tab. I can see the IP address where the user last logged in, how long this user has been a client or how long they've signed up and had an account. I can see other things like emails that they were recently sent. It's a nice summary page. I can also see the domain they have. WHMCS calls each account a product or service. That was something that I had to adjust to when I was first learning how to work in WHMCS. We want to think, oh, it's going to be under the domains tab. They're signing up for a domain. Actually, this is a product. This is a cPanel account. That's how WHMCS is defining this. We talked in WHM2 how you can change packages or change the type of account that a user might get. That's where you could also jump between a beginner account or an advanced account from that product service there. If you're a larger domain of one's own school, this will become helpful. We can see the server that an account is located on. I can see the domain that a user signed up with. If we needed to change this domain at one point, at some point down the road, this would be one of those places where you'd have to make that change. Again, we'll talk about this later on today. The username and password here, this is going to be your cPanel username and password. cPanel requires a set of credentials by default when you're creating an account. I think one of the beautiful things about domains is that we create a bridge so users don't actually have to know that username and password. It's there if you ever want to SFTP in and upload files in bulk or something. Users will get these credentials sent to them and they can easily change them in their own dashboards, but it is there for your reference. The other really helpful things here are these module commands. This is where I, if I'm in WHMCS, it's likely because I'm using one of these commands. I can easily recreate an account or put a fresh copy of cPanel out there. If you get someone that says, I've played around, this is cool, but I really want a fresh slate. Clicking create will do that. It can also be dangerous because it's going to overwrite whatever is there. Same thing with terminate. Terminate will delete data. It will remove the cPanel account from the server. I will say that I have clicked both of these buttons on accident and we have backups. That's okay. Know that even if you think the worst of the worst things happened, you click terminate, you even have an are you sure box? Just know that we have many layers of insurance built in just in case something happens, but suspend and unsuspend are kind of a middle ground, kind of like we were talking in WHM. It allows you to temporarily take a site offline, maybe for a copyright takedown notice, for example, or you have a site associated with a .edu domain and they're publishing something a little risque and you just want to do a little damage control. You do have this at your fingertips and just as quickly as suspending, you can quickly unsuspend as well. Those options are available. I will also say there is a change password option here, which you can't hurt clicking this. This is where you can basically sync everything up. I mentioned that we have a bridge where we're embedding C panel and sometimes that bridge can break or things get out of sync and what's happening is WHM CS has a set of credentials here that the server does not recognize. If we click change password, we're really just syncing up what WHM CS sees with what the server sees. It's one of the best ways that you can troubleshoot in domain of one's own. We'll cover this in a later session, but I like to mention it here as well. Scrolling down, we get a little information about the C panel account, which is pretty cool, I will say. I also have the ability to leave an admin note so I can say I love this account or maybe it's a, you know, you need to leave details from a support request or something. I can click save changes. That's going to then be added in as a note, which I can pull out later. I can also, under the more tab here, I can resend a welcome email, which is pretty cool. So I'll, sure I'll go ahead and do that. That's been recent. You can see I'm a little zoomed out, right, or zoomed in, but I have an emails tab here, which allows me to see the emails that a user has received. So I could click on one of these and I can see exactly what a user is getting when they sign up for an account. This is an email template that you can change. So this is all language if you want to, you know, link to support documentation or, for instance, maybe you don't want to share FTP passwords in an email. You can take that out. That's absolutely something you can do. We will share documentation to link to that. So you have that available to you, but also if you want to make changes, we can help too. The other thing I'll mention here is this log tab. The log tag becomes really helpful over time, just again, to help you see the type of activity happening on an account. This has been a test account for us. So there's quite a bit happening here, and you can see, you know, who's been making those changes and when. You know, we've obviously used Jim's account for a long time now, but you can see just us, you know, creating C panels, new accounts or new emails going to Jim, changing password we just did, we've modified things, we've terminated, we've recreated. So that log becomes really helpful, especially when you're working with other admins. We do recommend you all have your own set of credentials and WHMCS, and I'll show that in a second. But that becomes helpful here, because then you can say, okay, you know, Lauren made changes to this account. And I need to follow up with Lauren because I did not like what she did or, you know, obviously that happens a lot. So anyway, this becomes helpful. It's under the log tab right there. Anything I've missed on this space before we jump in to creating admins? No, I think you did a very good overview. I mean, the point maybe worth making is domains. You know, if they have sub domains, like ilovedomains.stateu.org, that domains tab effectively is empty. Yeah, because it doesn't see that as a top level domain, apart from the ilovedomains.stateu.org. So you'll get used to it. You use the product services tab and WHMCS a lot. And we find that the log tab is very useful as well as the email sent. I think it was great you showed that because you get to see what did this person, what information did they get? What do they know? And what do I need to kind of maybe troubleshoot around? So yeah, those are the big three. I will also mention too, from this page, you can, again, you can log directly into a user cPanel account, which again, really cool, right? I just recommend going straight from switch user and WordPress because that will show you exactly what the user sees. Just like WHM, this login to cPanel is just going to show you cPanel without the WordPress wrapper and embed. So it's not the same experience. And that was a concept for me that was really hard to grasp at first. So I'm, you know, if I'm repeating myself, that's why. All right. I mentioned that it's probably a good idea to if you have a team of domain of one's own admins for you all to have your separate set of credentials. That can be found under this wrench icon at the top under manage admins. So when you click that, you're going to need to, you'll be prompted for a password after which you'll be able to get in and you can create a new admin. You can see we've got a couple of different admin accounts here. This is a demo server, but you can click add new administrator. You'll want to select full admin here and then fill out those credentials there and click save changes. And then, of course, log in with those credentials going forward. So that would be the main thing that we would recommend just from an admin point of view here. The next thing I wanted to mention maybe would be email because I think email can be really cool from WHMCS. It's helpful when we talk about, you know, reaching out to accounts before we're cleaning them up. Or maybe, for instance, you wanted to reach out to, you know, inactive users, folks that have interacted with domains. Maybe they logged in, but they never signed up for an account. Maybe you want to reach out and say, hey, I saw you logged in. You know, what gives? Do you want to sign up? Are you stuck? Do you have questions? You know, those kinds of things. So it's again, it's kind of nice to have those options. So I will show you where that lives. And again, WHMCS moved a few things around. So it's always, and they also changed names too, which is annoying. And yeah, in an older version, it was called mass mail. And I do have it open here. This is what it would look like for an older version of WHMCS. It would be under clients mass mail tool. And again, I use this all the time. In newer versions, it's actually going to be under utilities. And it's email campaigns, which is a little more fancy. Documentation, I believe still refers to it as mass mail. So we'll probably need to update that honestly, or just say, if you've got the newer version, this is where it is. But you would click create a new campaign, or, you know, mass mail here, right? So all right, I'll stick to one tab just so we're not annoying with the campaign. Yeah. But let's say I, you know, I want to email all inactive accounts, you know, or I want to go to product services here. And I want to look at everyone who was recently suspended. Maybe you're in the process of cleaning out accounts, you suspended all accounts that were on the chopping block. And now you want to email all of those suspended accounts and say, Hey, just making sure you don't need this before we terminate it, right? So it can be really handy. The other thing too is we have this space up here called a client group, and you can actually create your own group. So while WHMCS has, you know, natural groupings, active accounts, servers, you know, things like that, you can say, I want to email everyone from the domains camp workshop that I did last month. And I'm going to add everyone to a new client group called that, you know, so again, we have documentation on this, we'll make sure to share and discord. We can also help you set that up and think through these workflows with you. But it's just worth noting that this is an option. And then of course, you would compose message. Oh, I've got to create one, create a campaign name, testing DOO. We'll compose that message. And now, I think that's everything. Oh, I've got to check a box. Love that. Maybe not. Okay. Well, great. This is what happens when you do it on the fly. Oh, it's a demo server. That's why. All right. So if I did it, troubleshooting live is invaluable. So all right, we know you plan this and it went as well as you thought. Exactly. I do know it will work here though, because I use this regularly. I'm actually on the previous server that we've used. I'm going to, let's say, just compose a message here, 81 participants. So I would send this email down. I could then have a subject, write my email and click send. I also have the ability to load a saved message if I wanted to and then resend an email template or something. So anyway, not to get into the nitty gritty, but that's how you would go about sending those emails. Any questions or anything else you all want to cover in WHMCS? I do like that. One of the things that came up that's worth, because it can be a point of confusion, is what's the difference between an active and an inactive user? And what does it mean for an account to be pending? And that's something that actually comes up and you'll see it. And the answer to the first question is, what happens when an account is pending? And I'm going to add the screen back to the thing is a pending account essentially means the same thing as an active account. It's just a way for someone to go through and mark all those pending accounts basically looked at. It's almost a tool where you can review accounts if you wanted to keep track of everybody who was doing it. A lot of times you'll see like, if you have a big domain of one's own school and they're not tracking that, they'll see like 1500 pending accounts. Those accounts are working fine. There's not an issue. They're just pending in terms of a review. So that's all pending means it doesn't change anything in terms of access. And you can bulk update them too. Like if you want to review each one or something, you can do that. But you can also just mass change all of them if you like to just kind of check in every once in a while and go, cool, we've had 50 cents the last time I looked. Totally. But even if you left them here, it's not a big deal either. It won't change anything. And the other thing that's somewhat of a mystery to me, and so I'm going to throw this back out to everybody here is the active and inactive. That's a status that you control from the client area. So if you go into a client's account, and so let's search right there, you'll see, you can look for me as an example of not to use anyone else's data, right? You'll see that in this space, there is a place where it notes whether this account is active and it's in the profile, right? So you see the status, but you can see that's changed in the profile page where it says underneath language, active, inactive, closed. And I think one of the things that can be confusing is an account can still be an active and it will show if it was created in a certain way. And I don't know if this is a bug or not, but it should usually be active. If it's inactive, I would change it to active, but 99% of the time it's inactive. I mean, it's active, so I maybe can shed a little bit of light on this, although other people might have more information. Inactive, it tends to be a thing if someone has logged in, but not signed up for an account, so that's zero that Lauren was showing us earlier. And after a while, WHMCS goes, well, I guess they don't care. Inactive. They can still log back in, but WHMCS says, basically, if you're not going to become active any time soon, I'm not going to show you on the list of people because you'll just be taking up space, basically. Yeah, and I think the state U, WHMCS is a little bit wonky, I must say, because that's right. If you don't have a product or service, it's supposed to show inactive. So we do a lot of testing in state U, so that sometimes does make it hard to show the workflows as they're meant to be seen, but if you don't have a product or service status is inactive, if you do have a product or service status is active, that's how it's supposed to be. Ideally, gotcha. Yeah. Thank you for sharing all the lights. Yeah, I know we're running out of time in this session, so I think in another one, I do want to cover how you would give someone access to two cPanel accounts. That's something that you would do in products. In the summary tab, you could quickly add in another cPanel account under add new order, so right there-ish, wherever it is. Probably says box on the second to right. Right, so I don't want us to, we're going to run out of time here, so I promise we'll get to it. We have documentation for that too, just know it's coming. Anyway, if you have additional questions or anything else that you want to cover in WHMCS, just let us know in Discord. We also have a Q&A coming up too, and we thank you for your time. This has been awesome. WHMCS is the least interesting part of domains in my mind, but I think it's still really important because it's a cool record book. Yeah, the record book part of it made it more interesting. Yeah. Opinions vary, Lauren. Opinions vary. For me. For you. I think it's a little dull, but you know. Anyway. I like that it's green, or I like the color scheme better. That's true. All right. Thanks all. Bye-bye.