Sabrienix has been selling a few Mumble servers here and there, enough that we made our first donation to the Mumble project yesterday (I think? The days all kind of run together). So far we’ve been pretty speedy at setting them up, I don’t think anyone’s waited more than about 6 hours for their account information… but I thought hey this could be even quicker if it’s automated, right?
So I’d heard that you could write your own custom modules for WHMCS, so I start looking for it. It took me a bit to find the API kits, because for some reason they don’t seem to show up in any relevant Google search, but they’re actually pretty well in plain view on the Wiki if I’d bothered to look there first.
So I download the file, geeked with anticipation – “this is gonna be so cool.” Then I open the file. This is it? One crumby stub module littered with pseudo-code, and a one page PDF that basically says “go for it!” They even have the audacity to call the process easy?
Getting your module setup to be read by WHMCS is pretty easy, if you read the instructions. Passing information to your module is pretty trivial. How does one pass information back? I have no idea. I filed a support ticket, and got back a terribly ambiguous and short response about using “overrideable product options” which I could then access through my module. Great, I can access them – but I can’t seem to write to anything in such a manner that it shows up at all in WHMCS.
I can’t seem to figure out a way to have the module emit a templated email, so at the moment I’m calling mail() from inside the module just to get the details to the end user. I’m going to go trawling the forums tomorrow I think, to see if I can find a way – it would be nice to have the account automatically attributed to a server in WHMCS, and have the emails go through WHMCS’s system so they’re logged and whatnot.
But hey, at least it works now… a user can sign up while we’re all asleep and they get their server as soon as they pay. 
Tags: sabrienix
It’s great to see that you are donating to the Mumble project! That was definitely something that made me want to sign up with you over anyone else. Few projects have the potential to radically change the way people do something as Mumble. In a world of poor quality proprietary group VOIP, Mumble can use all the love it can get.
I’ve found more than once that modules for a system/application are much harder than the developers of said system would lead you to believe. I suppose if you developed the system, plugging things into it would be much easier then.
Hey there,
I completely agree. We’re almost at the point where we’ll be making a monthly donation, from there it’s all about improving it. We’re also trying to concentrate on getting the word out about Mumble in general, because you’re right – the proprietary stuff is dominating the market and there’s really no reason it should.