Revision as of 15:09, 22 August 2013

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

Announcements

The announcements system, along with 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 navigate to Support > Announcements and click Add New Announcement.
• Enter the date, title and announcement itself into the appropriate fields.
• If the announcement should be available publicly tick the Published? checkbox. In this way an article can be drafted, saved and published at a later date.
• If you operate in multiple languages click the language beneath the main text area to reveal an additional text area into which the article can be translated.
• Finally click Save Changes

To edit an existing announcement simply click the edit icon next to it.

Downloads

You can add downloads to the site for your users, this could be anything from product user manuals, relevant software utilities or even the actual products being sold. They can either be hosted locally or remotely.

• The first step is to create a category to contain downloads, navigate to Support > Downloads and click the Add Category tab
• Enter a name and description to be displayed to clients. Tick the Hide checkbox to make this category invisible, it will be available only via direct links. Click Add Category.
• Now click the Add Download tab to enter the file type, title and description of the file.
• In the Upload File section select the location of the file. If the file is large it's recommend to upload via FTP and select the Manual FTP Upload to Downloads Folder option, for smaller files the Upload File can make the process easier.
• Manual FTP Upload to Downloads Folder - For remotely hosted files simply enter the full URL to the files starting with http:// in the Enter Filename field, for files uploaded via FTP to the /downloads directory it should just be the filename.
• Upload File - Click the Browse button and locate the file on your computer, it will be uploaded to the /downloads dir.
• Downloads can be either public or private and if private, only users who are logged in will have access to them. You can also specify certain products which can be downloaded only once the associated package is purchased: Product Downloads Distribution
• Finally click Add Download.

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

Knowledgebase

The knowledgebase allows you to create a collection of commonly asked questions and their answers. You can group these into categories and set them to be either visible or private (admin only). The client area offers the user the choice of browsing through the articles in your KB or searching based on keywords they enter.

• The first step is to create a category to contain articles, navigate to Support > Knowledgebase and click the Add Category tab
• Enter a name and description to be displayed to clients. Tick the Hide checkbox to make this category invisible, it will only be visible in the admin area. Click Add Category.
• Now click the Add Article tab and enter the title of the first article and click Add Article to be taken to the editing page.
• The Category field displays which categories this article belongs to, a single article can be assigned to multiple categories by ctrl + clicking.
• The views and votes statistics can be changed here, it displays how many people have viewed this article and how many rated it helpful.
• Ticking the Private checkbox will mean this article is not visible to visitors so clients must be logged in to read it.
• The Display Order enables the default alphanumeric display order (1,2,3,a,b,c...) to be overridden with a custom one. An article with a display order value or 0 would be displayed at the top of the category, 1 beneath that, 2 beneath that and so on.
• Enter the contents of your article in the large text area.
• If you operate in multiple languages click the language beneath the main text area to reveal an additional text area into which the article can be translated.
• Finally click Save Changes

To edit an existing article simply click the category name and then the article name.

Support Tickets

The support ticket system is a fully featured ticket desk that allows you to handle all communication with your clients. Featuring threaded discussions, private notes, ticket flagging, varying priority levels, auto inactive ticket closing and much much more... We have a full page dedicated to the Support Ticket System here.

Network Issues

The network issues area is designed to be a dedicated area for you to make announcements to customers about current and scheduled/planned service affecting issues, separate from your main news and announcements feed. For example, this can be used to notify clients about current or planned server outages, software updates, planned maintenance, and other things like that.

For details please visit the Network Issues page

Search Engine Friendly URLS

Search Engine Friendly URLs are where a URL which once was "/knowledgebase.php?action=view&id=1" becomes "/knowledgebase/1/How_do_I_access_my_control_panel.html". You can enable these for the announcements, downloads and knowledgebase sections of the WHMCS client area.

1. To enable SEF URLs, first check and ensure you have mod_rewrite installed on your server
2. Next go to Setup > General Settings > Support and tick the box for "KB SEO Friendly URLs"
3. Finally, you must also rename the file named htaccess.txt to .htaccess in your root WHMCS directory

The above steps apply to Apache. For IIS environments, you must make sure IIS has URL rewrite installed (http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/460/using-the-url-rewrite-module/), and then you can setup the rewrite rules as follows:

1. Open IIS Manager
2. Browse to the site you want to add rule to
3. In the right pane double-click and select urlrewrite
4. On right side inbound rules select import rules
5. Cut and paste the rules from the htaccess.txt file in the root directory of WHMCS into rewrite rules field
6. Finally click Apply to complete the process

Notes

Only Latin characters (a-z, 0-9) in the title are currently supported in the Search Engine Friendly URLs. Any unsupported characters will be converted into a dash (-).

Nginx

A user has suggested using the following rewrite rules when running Nginx instead of Apache. Please note that WHMCS Support are unable to provide assistance for these, they are provided strictly as-is.

# Announcements
rewrite ^/announcements/([0-9]+)/[a-zA-Z0-9-]+\.html$ /./announcements.php?id=$1 last;
rewrite ^/announcements$ /./announcements.php last;

# Downloads
rewrite ^/downloads/([0-9]+)/([^/]*)$ /./downloads.php?action=displaycat&catid=$1 last;
rewrite ^/downloads$ /./downloads.php last;

#Knowledgebase
rewrite ^/knowledgebase/([0-9]+)/[a-zA-Z0-9-]+\.html$ /./knowledgebase.php?action=displayarticle&id=$1 last;
rewrite ^/knowledgebase/([0-9]+)/([^/]*)$ /./knowledgebase.php?action=displaycat&catid=$1 last;
rewrite ^/knowledgebase$ /./knowledgebase.php last;