We are happy to announce the beta release of SoluteDNS for WHMCS Professional Edition. The Professional Edition is a rewrite of the legacy WHMCS module in the structure of the earlier released Community Edition and fully utilises the SoluteDNS Core.
Community Edition vs Professional Edition
You where probably used to the: Lite, Starter, Standard and Premium plans. Now the Community and Professional editions are available these plans are no longer here. In general if you have a Lite or Starter plan your best bet is the Communiy Edition. If you have any other plan your best of with the Professional Edition. You can compare both plans here.
Improvements
The new Professional Edition comes with some changes and improvements compared to the old legacy module. Some of these changes are:
- The Template system and handling has been revised to make it more easier to configure. To use dynamically assigned IP’s you can now use the {ip} and {ip|127.0.0.1} tags. The last tag including an IP address which acts as a default fallback IP address. If no IP can be found and no fallback IP has been set no records is added. The system now automatically adds multiple records when multiple assigned IP’s have been found for both IPv4 and IPv6. Regarding to tags in templates the old domain identifier tag <domain> has been changed to {domain}.
- When you save a domain or product in WHMCS, SoluteDNS will now check if the index is still up to date to avoid wrong assignments.
- Date conversion now applies the in WHMCS configured default format.
- The client e-mail address shown on the admin DNS Management page now redirects to opening a new ticket instead of opening the local mail client.
- Empty non terminal records are now hidden for both admin and clients.
- The message system has been updated to allow multiple messages at the same time through the same channel.
- The Staff Access management has been simplified to allow one admin group for full access. All other groups which have module access as configured in WHMCS are only able to performe DNS management operations and cannot change any settings.
- You can now add and select a different template to avoid customisations being overwritten when a automated update is being performed.
Upgrading
As the new module comes with quit some changes, upgrading through the auto updater has been disabled. You can download and upload an updater scripts which first prepares your database for the Professional Edition module. When done it will attempt to remove old files and install the new Professional Edition module. If you decide to go with the Community Edition we recommend to uninstall the current module and afterwards activate the Community Edition as fresh installation.
Developers
The Professional Edition uses the SoluteDNS Core which means all DNS operations can be called using the SoluteDNS Core API. For local operations there is an System API which helps to clear zone information locally or for example applying an locally created template to a zone. If you have made any customization we strongly advise to review this code as it’s most likely you have to update this code as well.
Deprecated Functionality
Some functionality has been deprecated in this new release.
- All SoluteDNS crons have been removed. We are now fully relying on the WHMCS system cron which makes installation and maintenance easier.
- The Local API has been removed in favour of the Core and System API’s. Please review the documentation of both the Professional Edition addon and SoluteDNS Core to update your customisations.
- The CLI tool has been removed since SoluteDNS now allows you to call (custom) script directly from the CLI.
- The Multi Master/Cluster functionality has also been deprecated as it was hardly used and caused too much hassle in maintaining SoluteDNS.
We are eager to start this new chapter in the SoluteDNS books. If you have any feedback please do not hesitate to contact us!
