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Blesta: Over A Year And Still Lacking Features...


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So I purchased a Blesta license before v3 was released. Was very excited and was ready to move my entire business over, but then found out that a lot of the features we use were missing that made me change my mind. So I thought I'll try again sometime in the future after Blesta matures a bit more.

 

The recent price increase by a competitor software was a push to reconsider Blesta again. But I am very disappointed at the progress! In recent times I've found our domain business is doing really well and now accounts for almost 40% of all sales. But the Blesta module for eNom has not been touched in years. I remember this being the main reason why we didn't switch. Fast forward a year +, and this is again the deal breaker for us.

 

The eNom module is very limited and lacks very basic domain registration and management features, not enough for a business that has a growing domains division that accounts for 40% of all sales.

 

Being a UK based company that manages a lot of .UK domains it still lacks more specific API field requirement options as well. It has already been raised and feature request submitted by another user over a year ago:

http://www.blesta.com/forums/index.php?/topic/1990-enom-couk-registrations/

http://www.blesta.com/forums/index.php?/topic/2626-orguk-domains/

As you can see, no official reply posted and feature request has not been acknowledged.

 

In the meantime, a competitor is really improving their domain / eNom module because they have already identified that domains are becoming big especially with hundreds of new gTDLs already released and more in the pipeline.

 

Furthermore, they are adding NEW features. Features such as "Claim Your .UK" addon, domain name spinner, etc. etc. But Blesta development seems to have other plans and priorities lie elsewhere.

 

This post isn't meant to be a complaint but rather the main reason why we are not using Blesta. It's competitor seems to be one step ahead. I keep on reading on other forums how Blesta is the best software and has ALL the features now but really we shouldn't kid ourself, it still is lacking some basic stuff, especially domain registrar modules.

 

I'll come back again in a years time and see whats changed and if theres any new developments.

 

/end

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I do agree on the domain front, however I think there are bigger features that take some precedence. One being a mass mailing feature, which is just down the road and affiliates which again is something coming in the next few versions. You should also remember, Blesta only has a few developers and therefore things take longer than said competitor which has a whole team behind it. Additionally Blesta has proven to be more stable and an all around great product and I regret nothing in choosing it as my billing software of choice.

 

Not to mention there is a pretty extensible API to Blesta so you could look into adding the needed requirements for the domain module yourself.

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Yeah for only 2 years in development from the launch date you can't expect it to be fully filled with features... "Rome wasn't built in a day" and they had more than 3 builders. "Slow and steady wins the race" remember that from the tortoise and the hare story book.

Blesta has grown a lot but if you don't follow the development you don't see what has changed. Just because one module you like hasn't been updated doesn't mean the development is lacking features.

 

3.5 is aimed at improving the SolusVM Module and the configuration, etc.

3.4 was aimed at Client security (Two factor Auth), Knowledgebase, etc. Change Log here.

3.3 was aimed at Multicraft, fraudlabspro, pro forma invoices, price override, copy packages, pro-rota, etc. Change Log here.

3.2 was aimed at converted client area to bootstrap, client docs plugin, select template per company, improve stripe, etc. Change Log here.

 

Can't remember what was changed in 3.1 as I can't find much in the change log to tell you.

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Our competitor hasn't released an official feature update since we released version 3.0 a year and a half ago (5.3 was a big bugfix release that didn't follow semantic versioning). Many people are disappointed with their v6 beta. We are about to release 3.5, and have added many features since our initial release.

 

We are pushing forward with needed features, but it takes time. Better support for domains is becoming a big priority as well as a few other items we'll be addressing soon.

 

Thanks for your feedback, and for taking the time to register and post. There are a lot of people who are not happy with our competitor and are waiting for xyz to transfer to Blesta. After each release more and more people switch, so we know we are headed the right direction.

 

Cheers

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Well I'm using Blesta for 17 months and while i'm satisfated with Blesta,mainly with stability I can agree with some parts of your feedback about futures.

In time when I started with Blesta I was hope there will be much more  integrations and futures  for let say 1 year in forward(expecually 3th party)   but great stability (without even one problem for 17 months in my case) and fact that code is 99% open source  is something that force me to bealive that Blesta was(in time I buy it) and still is most potent billing and accounting software on market and to be honest I tought there will be much more devlopers active till now here.

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We are all waiting module for domain management, DNS editor, and not only for a given registrar.

 

Regarding enom registrar, I recommend you to use in place internetbs as their API is better (particularly for EU cctld and their requested fields) as well as their price. But if you are in EU, they are now using/charging EU VAT (I think UK VAT rate).

 

I had feeling the Blesta domain management, dns editor is coming with Blesta 3.5

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Austin said:

 Blesta only has a few developers and therefore things take longer than said competitor which has a whole team behind it

By the way WHM** had maybe since only last 2 years more than one developer, so it's just because they not started on a MVC model or multi-company CMS when Blesta did, that why they have added/build more features when Blesta team builded at this time still the core, but for about last 4 years I do not see really more feature added to WHM** , in my opinion they are now limited in their evolution and module garden company makes plugins for so many variant of things but not so great in my opinions... so remember you AWBS they had all you wishes to sell/manage domains (and had the whole market share), and WHM** by adding web hosting feature was able to take most of the whole market from them, but now the really next things is Mutil-company, and strong core to extend feature/extension, and WHM** can not do that, it's just a matter of time (few years), for they become what is AWBS today, an old dying king without kingdom.

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I do agree on the domain front, however I think there are bigger features that take some precedence. One being a mass mailing feature, which is just down the road and affiliates which again is something coming in the next few versions.

 
Can imagine that for UK businesses, the ability to register a .co.uk domain may be a tiny bit more important, than having a mailing list.  :o
 
 
That said, you might want to ask eNom why they still require this particular field though.
Nominet (the .uk registry, of which eNom is a reseller), no longer has a hard requirement on having that information, and made it optional.
 
"The schema http://www.nominet.org.uk/epp/xml/contact-nom-ext-1.0 can be used to specify optional account fields."
 
 
They do are pretty strict about the information you do send them.
Once had a customer who was ordering as private individual, and put in a "-" as company name instead of leaving the "company" name blank.
Got his domain suspended by Nominet's burocrats because company "-" did not exist in the company name databases they cross-check against.  :rolleyes:
 
 


Not to mention there is a pretty extensible API to Blesta so you could look into adding the needed requirements for the domain module yourself.

 
I do disagree with that.
Blesta needs better core functionality before any third-party can write proper domain modules for that.
 
Certain domain extensions do require extra fields, and a proper mechanism to ask the user for extra information would be helpful. E.g. where domain modules extend a base class that knows what information the major extensions need, and handles prompting the user for that, instead of requiring every domain module to define its own forms, and have its own strings (which is burdensome if you want to translate them).
As well as that Blesta should check the availability of multiple domains with a single function call, instead of making multiple calls, resulting in a seperate connection being made for each domain to check.
 
 

Yeah for only 2 years in development from the launch date you can't expect it to be fully filled with features...

 
With all due respect, Blesta 3 has been in development since at least 2011, when they ran "buy Blesta 2, get Blesta 3 when it lands, really soon now" style advertising.
And it's still lacking essential functionality, especially for hosting companies outside the USA, of which this thread is yet another example.
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With all due respect, Blesta 3 has been in development since at least 2011, when they ran "buy Blesta 2, get Blesta 3 when it lands, really soon now" style advertising.

And it's still lacking essential functionality, especially for hosting companies outside the USA, of which this thread is yet another example.

 

Correct mate but that was alpha, beta was in 2013 I believe as that's when I joined the forum. I joined when we got the email to join the beta.

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We are pushing forward with needed features, but it takes time. Better support for domains is becoming a big priority as well as a few other items we'll be addressing soon.

 

Yes.. i need to sell domains with my blesta.

On ResellerClub module , domain wasn't updated.

many tld domain coming, like .science .party .wtf .life .social and etc.

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I do agree on the domain front, however I think there are bigger features that take some precedence.

 

Not to mention there is a pretty extensible API to Blesta so you could look into adding the needed requirements for the domain module yourself.

 

While I understand your point, but I would say that this is quite subjective as different businesses / users have different requirements. For me right now a fully comprehensive eNom module would rank as high priority, while this may not necessary be the same for another user.

 

I appreciate that Blesta has an extensive API, but I for one am not a developer and don't want to spend an arm and a leg in hiring someone to do this for me when the features I require come as standard out-of-the box with the competitor software.

 

Our competitor hasn't released an official feature update since we released version 3.0 a year and a half ago (5.3 was a big bugfix release that didn't follow semantic versioning). Many people are disappointed with their v6 beta. We are about to release 3.5, and have added many features since our initial release.

 

We are pushing forward with needed features, but it takes time. Better support for domains is becoming a big priority as well as a few other items we'll be addressing soon.

 

Thanks for your feedback, and for taking the time to register and post. There are a lot of people who are not happy with our competitor and are waiting for xyz to transfer to Blesta. After each release more and more people switch, so we know we are headed the right direction.

 

Cheers

 

Paul, as I hinted in my original post, I do really like the Blesta product and do hope that we can move to it sometime in the very near future. If all the features required by my business was already available in Blesta, believe you me I would probably jump ship to Blesta the very same day! Domain is now very big business for me, but right now I feel that Blesta is not quite ready or fully equipped to handle the domain front out-of-the-box.

 

While the competitor has not really released any new features I agree, but I would say that it has tried to improve it's eNom domain module and are quite proactive. Last year they released a "Claim your .UK" addon when Nominet released shorter .UK domains. V6 now comes with an eNom name spinner. Furthermore, there are also developers that have released good eNom modules that further enhance the domain and SSL business that we are using. So essentially, if it hasn't been released by the competitor there is something out there already released by a developer, can't say the same about Blesta just yet.

 

I do hope that it will be considered and feature request sent higher up in the priority list.

 

Well I'm using Blesta for 17 months and while i'm satisfated with Blesta,mainly with stability I can agree with some parts of your feedback about futures.

In time when I started with Blesta I was hope there will be much more  integrations and futures  for let say 1 year in forward(expecually 3th party)   but great stability (without even one problem for 17 months in my case) and fact that code is 99% open source  is something that force me to bealive that Blesta was(in time I buy it) and still is most potent billing and accounting software on market and to be honest I tought there will be much more devlopers active till now here.

 

Yes nelsa, Blesta does have an impressive stability record and, although I'm not a coder, its quite apparent that their code is very well written. I am too quite surprised there isn't an active developer community just yet. I don't know whether its because there isn't a lot of companies using Blesta just yet, but at the same time I would say that it's probably because Blesta doesn't yet tick all the boxes, if more developers got involved I'm sure more people would migrate over much sooner. It's a bit like the debate on what comes first - an egg or the chicken?

 

So in the Blesta scenario - do you wait for customers to come first before working / investing in modules or do the latter first and attract more customers as a result?

 

We are all waiting module for domain management, DNS editor, and not only for a given registrar.

 

Regarding enom registrar, I recommend you to use in place internetbs as their API is better (particularly for EU cctld and their requested fields) as well as their price. But if you are in EU, they are now using/charging EU VAT (I think UK VAT rate).

 

I had feeling the Blesta domain management, dns editor is coming with Blesta 3.5

 

Unfortunately we have considered all other providers but for us eNom suits us best. Due to the volume, we also have some pretty good pricing from them too.

 

 

Can imagine that for UK businesses, the ability to register a .co.uk domain may be a tiny bit more important, than having a mailing list.  :o

 

 

Couldn't agree with you more!!!!

 

 

 

 

But thanks all for reading my feedback!

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While I understand your point, but I would say that this is quite subjective as different businesses / users have different requirements. For me right now a fully comprehensive eNom module would rank as high priority, while this may not necessary be the same for another user.

 

I appreciate that Blesta has an extensive API, but I for one am not a developer and don't want to spend an arm and a leg in hiring someone to do this for me when the features I require come as standard out-of-the box with the competitor software.

 

There's always ModulesBakery.

 

They charge reasonable development prices. I'm sure they'd be happy to develop an eNom module for you if you ask them to.

 

Or better yet, why not crowd-source the cost of the module development with ModulesBakery?

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There's always ModulesBakery.

 

They charge reasonable development prices. I'm sure they'd be happy to develop an eNom module for you if you ask them to.

 

Or better yet, why not crowd-source the cost of the module development with ModulesBakery?

 

Why should a customer have to cough up these development costs, when Blesta itself advertises eNom support on their front page?

There aren't any "only works with .com and .net domains, not with .co.uk, .eu, .ca, etc." restrictions listed there, are there?

 

Doing your own development make senses if you want a registrar not already supported, or an exotic feature. It shouldn't be necessary for core functionality.

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Im a BIG supporter for the new Domain Management system, we need badly, but for now we can close our eyes a litle, all of us developpers are also helping a lot on the Domain functionality, so if you need any special requriment just ask us to help you add it :blesta:

 

I think WHMCS 6.0 will be the turnaround for blesta :blesta: did you check WebHostingTalk foruns recently lol, (i have a broken rib, and i can't laugh because it hurts eheh, but I cant stop it)

 

For all visitores viweing this foruns, try blesta for free, and judge for your self the power in your hands :blesta:

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Im a BIG supporter for the new Domain Management system, we need badly, but for now we can close our eyes a litle, all of us developpers are also helping a lot on the Domain functionality, so if you need any special requriment just ask us to help you add it :blesta:

 

I think WHMCS 6.0 will be the turnaround for blesta :blesta: did you check WebHostingTalk foruns recently lol, (i have a broken rib, and i can't laugh because it hurts eheh, but I cant stop it)

 

For all visitores viweing this foruns, try blesta for free, and judge for your self the power in your hands :blesta:

 

Well you are right here, I turned to Blesta following the latest v6.0 release. I've got a dev license setup and the hype is not living up to expectations.

 

I'm SUR a lot of client hs stopped moving to blesta , just for the domain management system, and the order related to it . so

Im a BIG supporter for the new Domain Management system .

 

I am a prime example of this. I ended up just renewing my support and updates with WHMCS early to lock in the lower price only because Blest doesn't offer what I need right now while WHMCS offers pretty much all the features I need out-of-the-box. I will visit again before the next renewal to see the progress of this in Blesta, fingers crossed this is the final year of us using WHMCS.

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