What’s new in WHMCS v7 – Automatic Updates

We have been Beta testing the new WHMCS v7 on our NVMe Web Hosting and today we’re going to take a look at what’s new in WHMCS V7 and guess what? This is likely going to be the last update you ever manually have to do for WHMCS because automatic updates are finally here. Maybe all those complaints from on WHMCS on Facebook and on their blog finally got through!

Remember last year, WHMCS went through a period of releasing security updates every week or few weeks at best. It was an unacceptable position for users to be placed in. By having to divert time out of their days to constantly update WHMCS just to keep their clients secure. Not only does v7 include auto-updates it’s got a new easy to use installer for first time users. A faster more streamlined checkout for PayPal users, TLD spotlights, simple product configuration and support for PHP 7.

WHMCS Automatic Updates

Last year when everyone was inundated with WHMCS updates, we worked out we spent an average of five hours a month updating WHMCS. That’s fine if you have a team of people behind you but a lot of users of WHMCS and our customers don’t have the luxury of a team of people and many people work on their own. The whole idea of WHMCS is to automate many tasks so it was ridiculous that you have to spend hours updating the software. What made the situation worse was, most users have some sort of customization either a custom logo, different text in the language file or for some users a complete customized WHMCS theme. Each update wiped out any of these user’s updates causing a huge problem for them. Let’s not forget, other software providers like SoulsVM have had automatic updates for years so this is long overdue.

On the face of it and not surprisingly since cPanel owns a financial stake in WHMCS. Automatic updates look a lot like your cPanel server updates. There are options to choose what update branch you want to automatically update too;

Stable
Release Candidate
Beta
Current Version

Most users are going to be using the “stable” option for automatic updates. It’s good to see the ability to turn updates off for people who have customized WHMCS. Another annoying trait of updates was the WHOIS servers file. Each update meant you had to keep adding the whois servers back into the whoisservers.php file. All the new TLDs like .holiday or .media were always missing meaning until you spent time placing them back in the file your customers could not search and register these domain names. Not anymore! WHMCS now also updates whois servers automatically.

PayPal Integration

WHMCS now pre-fills the user’s email addresses in the PayPal login form. Plus itemized purchase details are now being displayed in the PayPal Checkout Experience. Help build confidence with your customers

Quick Start

Users who are new to WHMCS now have an easy to use the wizard to get them up and running. In five steps you can configure the most common and basic settings to get going from adding your first server for automatic account creation to setting domain name pricing which should make it a breeze to get setup now.

Domain Spotlights

You can now showcase your most popular domain names and cheapest pricing inside WHMCS. These featured TLDs will give more prominent exposure to these products

PHP 7 Support

WHMCS now has support for PHP 7.

On the face of WHMCS v7 and apart from the automatic update feature there’s not really that many new features. We expect just the automatic updates will save everyone valuable time. It seems WHMCS is really pushing the promotion of products recently with the addition of domain spotlights. In this version and product group spotlights in previous versions. We are sceptical as to how effective this is. Most people simply use WHMCS to manage customers, support and orders. Hardly anyone uses WHMCS to deliver their website to customers anymore. In many cases, these features don’t get used or, even seen by the end-user.

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