Revision as of 15:52, 11 May 2020

WHMCS includes a fully featured help desk for your clients. This includes announcements, downloads, a knowledgebase, and a ticketing system.

Announcements

The announcements system, in addition to showing announcements on the WHMCS homepage, will also output announcements into an XML RSS Feed for use in readers and on other websites.

To create an announcement:

1. Go to Support > Announcements and click Add New Announcement.
2. Enter the date, title, and announcement itself into the appropriate fields.
3. If the announcement should be available publicly, check the Published? checkbox. This lets you draft, save, and publish an article at a later date.
4. If you operate in multiple languages, click the language beneath the main text area to reveal an additional text area into which you can translate the article.
5. Click Save Changes.

To edit or delete an existing announcement, click the respective icon next to it.

Downloads

You can add downloads to the site for your users. This could be product user manuals, relevant software utilities, or even the actual products you sell. You can host them locally or remotely.

To create a category to contain downloads:

1. Go to Support > Downloads and click the Add Category tab.
2. Enter a name and description to display to clients.
3. Select the Hide checkbox to make this category invisible. If you enable this, the category only be available via direct links.
4. Click Add Category.
5. Click the Add Download tab to enter the file type, title, and description of the file.
6. In the Upload File section, select the location of the file. If the file is large, we recommend that you upload it via FTP and select the Manual FTP Upload to Downloads Folder option. For smaller files, the Upload File can make the process easier.
7. Manual FTP Upload to Downloads Folder — For remotely-hosted files, enter the full URL to the files, starting with http:// in the Enter Filename field. For files uploaded via FTP to the /downloads directory, only enter the filename.
8. Upload File — Click the Browse button and locate the file on your computer. It will upload to the /downloads directory. Downloads can be either public or private, and, if private, only logged in users will have access to them. You can also specify certain products that clients can only download once they purchase the associated package: Product Downloads Distribution
9. Click Add Download.

To edit an existing download, click the category name and then the download name.

Knowledgebase

You can use the WHMCS knowledgebase to create a collection of important information, including frequently-asked questions and their answers. You can group articles into public or hidden categories, allowing you to create separate knowledgebases for customers and staff.

You can access this feature at Support > Knowledgebase.

The Client Area offers the user the choice of browsing through the articles by category, by popular tags, or by searching for keywords.

Categories

Before you can start creating articles, you must create at least one category to store them in.

To do this:

1. Go to the Add Category tab.
2. Enter a display name.
3. If you want to create a staff-only hidden category, check Check to Hide. The category will then only be visible in the Admin Area.
4. Enter a description.
5. Click Add Category.

Articles

Articles are the pages that comprise the knowledgebase. Each article exists in at least one category.

To create an article:

1. Go to the Add Article tab.
2. Enter an article name.
3. Click Add Article.
4. Select the article's category or categories. To select more than one category, CTRL+click on the desired categories.
5. If you want to manually set the views or votes for the article, enter the desired numbers in Views, Votes For, or Total.
6. If you want to override the default alphanumeric display order, enter the desired number or letter in Display Order. For example, entering 0 would cause the article to display at the top of the category.
7. Check Private to only allow logged-in users to view the article.
8. Enter the desired tags by typing them into Tags. For more information, see Tags below.
   • Matching existing tags will display as you type. Press Enter to add the displayed tag.
   • To add a new tag, enter it and then press Enter or Space.
   • Tags cannot contain spaces.
9. Enter the article content and apply your desired formatting. For more information, see Images below.
10. To translate the article into additional languages, click that language under Multi-Lingual Translations under the text box. Then, translate the article in the new text box that appears.
11. Click Save Changes.

To edit an existing article, click the appropriate category names until you see the desired article, and then click the article name. Make the desired updates and then click Save Changes.

Tags

Knowledgebase tags highlight keywords for an article. You can use them to group articles across multiple categories that share a common theme.

Tags can generate a Tag Cloud showing the most common themes in articles and allowing the user to view all articles associated with a given tag regardless of category. Tags that occur more frequently will display in a larger font.

Images

To upload images using the Knowledgebase rich text editor:

1. In the rich text editor, select Insert > Image.
   
2. Choose the Upload tab and follow the prompts. The image URL will appear automatically at the cursor's current location in the content.

The last 25 images that you uploaded display as available under Recent images.

Your settings at Configuration () > System Settings > Storage Settings determine where to store uploaded images.

Support Tickets

The support ticket system is a fully featured ticket desk that allows you to handle all communication with your clients. The available features include threaded discussions, private notes, ticket flagging, varying priority levels, and auto inactive ticket closing. For more information, see Support Ticket System.

Network Issues

The network issues area is a dedicated area for you to make announcements to customers about current and scheduled or planned service-affecting issues, separate from your main news and announcements feed. For example, you could use this to notify clients about current or planned server outages, software updates, and planned maintenance.

For details, visit the Network Issues page.

Search Engine Friendly URLS

Search Engine Friendly URLs allow a URL that was "/knowledgebase.php?action=view&id=1" to become "/knowledgebase/1/How_do_I_access_my_control_panel.html". You can enable these for the MarketConnect landing pages, announcements, downloads, and knowledgebase sections of the WHMCS client area.

To do this in an Apache environment:

1. Navigate to Setup > General Settings > General tab.
2. Change the Friendly URLs menu to Fully Friendly Rewrite.
3. Click Save Changes.

For IIS environments, you must check whether the URL rewrite module is installed for IIS. Then, set up the rewrite rules as follows:

1. Open IIS Manager.
2. Browse to the site you want to add the rule to.
3. In the right pane, double-click and select urlrewrite.
4. On the right side inbound rules, select import rules.
5. Extract the mod_rewrite rules from the WHMCS -> General Settings -> Advanced Settings button for Friendly URL Setting -> Rewrite File.
6. Paste those rules into the into rewrite rules field.
7. Click Apply to complete the process.

Notes

Search Engine Friendly URLS only support Latin characters (a-z, 0-9) in the title. The system converts any unsupported characters into a dash (-).