WHMCS 8.0 is coming

WHMCS‘s next major release will have many new features and supports including shared users for client login and management, improved IDN support. WHMCS 8.0 will be released as soon as possible. Founder and CEO Matt Pugh answered the questions about WHMCS 8.0 on their official blog.

Top features of WHMCS 8.0

Here are the 5 top features of WHMCS 8.0, according to Matt Pugh, Founder, and CEO of WHMCS:

1. Shared users for client login and management, gives people the ability to have a single user account that has access to multiple different client accounts under a single login credential set – this presents a significant shift in the user authentication model for WHMCS and delivers on our most highly requested open feature request today.

2. A refreshed look and feel for the WHMCS admin area provides a slimmer, more lightweight and modern experience on desktop, and an improved responsive and touch-friendly experience for mobile and tablet devices.

3. Support for Email Sending Providers like MailGun, SendGrid, and SparkPost for improved email deliverability and reliability, combined with a more robust bulk email tool that enables you to better take advantage of email as a way to drive user engagement with your company.

4. Improved IDN support with added functionality to help enable and simplify IDN sales along with native full support for registration of internationalized domain names with Enom and ResellerClub.

5. Improved support for currencies, with increased limits for the size of numeric values across the product, as well as support for up to 3 decimal places for tax rates.

Matt Pugh answered the “what is this about changes being made to the minimum requirements for WHMCS 8.0.” question as,

“Version 8.0 will introduce new minimum requirements – specifically it will require PHP 7.2 as a minimum. Most users who are staying up to date and leveraging our latest feature releases are likely to already be set; the trend we see is that PHP 7.2 and 7.3 are very common. You probably will want to double-check and go ahead and schedule & perform any PHP updates for your production system before delving into v8.0. Module developers and users with heavy backend customizations will want to take the usual precautions: read the releases notes on each pre-production release. In there, exact library updates and other details will be shared; test your code on each version to ensure you code is upgrade compatible when General Availability arrives.”

The company decided the time for the release of 8.0 considering changes to the upstream PHP, changes in the other libraries, and third-party code they use and rely on, users’ requests. He underlined also that Version 8.0 is thier opportunity to make big changes behind the scenes, some of which we will see immediately with the release of 8.0, and some of which we won’t.

He talked about the changes, saying,

“With the user authentication changes, the WHMCS product becomes much more flexible for both the businesses running it, as well as the customers and businesses that use it, and with the newer PHP versions, you should see some nice performance gains too. Our team is working with ionCube right now to iron out a few remaining issues we’ve seen in the PHP 7.4 loaders, so we are hopeful that by the time we launch, we’ll have full compatibility with PHP 7.4.”