Recent Site Updates, WHMCS V6

Finally, after a year in production we released v3 of First2Host, a totally responsive design adding solid state drives (SSDs) Hybrid servers and 5 vps locations, not to mention a nice new hot design with actual footage from our German and Miami data centre. When we first started developing our client area side of things WHMCS v6 had not been announced, when v6 was announced they also made the world know they would be changing the smarty version and removing support for smarty tags.

This caused us some real problems with having half a client area which would not work on the new WHMCS v6. Some of you have noticed some important features are missing from your client area, things like balance information and cPanel resource usage are not displayed. The current version of the client area is actually the RC3 (Release Candidate) version and not the full production version. There’s other features missing too like our extended domain name control panel, IP unblocking to name just a few more.

The main issue we had as a business was the development of Geo4, Our new system to control the location of your services and the extended server range we have introduced. As our v2 website was based on WHMCS templates we had our WHMCS install deployed to our root directory making it impossible to introduce our new site and new server range until we pushed the client area to a different location. Of course we couldn’t push the client area to another location until we upgraded to V6 which would also break the current client area design.

After three weeks of working to make at least a minimum client area available to you we finally managed the current offering in place at the moment which allowed us to deploy our new range and site. We’re still working flat out to deliver the rest of the client area to our loyal customers but whilst we do this some features just are not possible to give you. We understand things like balance information is an important thing to have inside your account until we can publish the full version everyone is going to have to “rough” it so to speak.

You can still get your balance by asking one of the team on ticket, by live chat, or soon by phone support if you have an LTSP. We hope to have the IP unblocking feature active today at some point.

Upgrading to WHMCS V6?

If like us you have been using WHMCS for years, our install was a good 6 or 7 years old, it’s possible you will be using old style MYSQL passwords. V6 Version 6 utilizes PDO; mysqlnd (the library PDO utilizes to talk to the database) cannot handle these old passwords and you won’t be able to install V6 until you change the password on your database.

Using cPanel to change the password on the database does fix this issue so before upgrading take a full backup of your account, login to cPanel and change the database password. You will then need to change the password in the configuration.php file inside your install.