Support Center

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

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

We added images in WHMCS 7.10.

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. 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

This section describes a feature available in version 7.2 and above

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

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. Extract the mod_rewrite rules from WHMCS -> General Settings -> Advanced Settings button for Friendly URL Setting -> Rewrite File
6. Paste those rules into the into rewrite rules field
7. 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 (-).