Rocketz

I don't disagree at all. I've been preaching for a while now how Blesta should encourage more custom module development. I just have a sore spot for what happened here, and trying to think of ways we can guarantee it not happening again. The reason I seem sour on this is simple. I trust Blesta 100%. My business will be running on Blesta once the migration and customization is complete. I trust that Blesta will be there to issue security updates and software updates regularly. Blesta is a critical part of the business. I trust most of the developers here. Cyandark, Paulo, Naja have all shown they're willing to contribute time and resources into developing modules, even free ones. I trust them to do right by the customer. They've been here since V3 was released, and are still here today contributing. Can I trust a developer who made a pretty cool plugin, that people relied on, and then essentially deserted them? Like Mike mentioned above, everyone deserves a fresh start, but when you rely on software to run your business, you really don't want to break that trust, because it's very hard to get back.

Thanks. It makes sense, but it's not very comforting. That means there's a pattern of this developer willing to sign exclusivity agreements, to the detriment of existing customers.

One thing i'll add : The order form needs to be as simple as possible. The least amount of clicks a customer has to do, and the least information required from them will go a long way to increase sign ups. If anything, anything at all can be pre-filled, it should be done. Like a discount code you want used to entice them. There's obviously an industry-standard way of ordering services. It doesn't mean it can't be changed or made better There needs to be a focus group or poll to see how many Blesta users use which option. If it's only 5% of customers using the "show group" function (for example), then that needs to take a back seat to planning how the order form works. Right now, there's no data to go on. Blesta, and ourselves, are making life harder for everyone by 1) not asking for data, 2) not providing it. Before we try and get the Blesta guys to change things and they commit the resources to this, there should be some good data to go on first. And other options need to be looked at too, can a 3rd party developer do this? Is this something only Blesta can do? Data is king

Before plunking any money down on these modules, I'd appreciate knowing what changed? Why are you back to developing for Blesta? And how do we know you're not going to pack up and go away again? I'm not a fan of buying modules, just to be abandoned by the developer later on. So until there's some satisfactory answers, I wouldn't pay a penny on these yet.

Nice work guys. It's good to see this kind of collaboration

Quick question : can't we just add the chat code automatically to the footer area or something in blesta? What does the widget do differently?

I hear you. All good points. Blesta is under developed for the hosting industry. Blesta's vision of their software vs. reality is where the problem is. I really believe Blesta thought they could develop the core part of the software, make it all very modular, and then developers would take it from there and offer modules based on demand. Reality is that there are only ~5 module developers for Blesta, and the market is so small, they get very little out of making modules. Some modules exist, and make a really good impact on the overall software, but you're basically relying on a single person to extend Blesta to the point you need it to be at. The reason is companies don't want the headaches of having to search out developers for features that the industry expects to be standard in any software release now. So the customer base isn't growing much, which means less developers. A classic catch-22. An idea I had a little while back would be for Blesta to partner with developers, get all the code going in the same direction, and implement those modules directly into Blesta, and they pay the developers. I'm not going to assume what the finances of that arrangement would be, but it's an idea. One other thing that should be done is really start doing focus groups of actual users, of varying company sizes. And then pivoting in small, quick releases, based on that feedback. One of Blesta's competitors just released a feature... auto-update. Because it was the highest voted feature by their community. I won't get into how ridiculous that kind of feature is, because if you can install the software, you sure can update it. Especially since no one in their right mind would auto-update their billing system. But they spent months of dev time creating this feature and trying to hype it up. Stupid stupid stupid. It shows they didn't really talk to the people running their software and relied on community upvotes instead. The opportunity cost is high. I'm going to give Blesta a shot after their initial 4.0 release. This release, from what I can tell is more of a major re-factoring and maintenance release, positioning Blesta for better future updates. So I'm not expecting a lot of critical features to be in it, and I hope you aren't either. Documentation is a separate issue. I really do hope Blesta comes to understand their core market segment, which is hosting. It's where it was born. The reason for its existence was the faltering of previous competitors. Get that industry taken care of first, grow the business, and then look at other industries that are struggling to get by with subpar billing systems and hit them up. Don't try to be a generic be-all billing system yet.

Absolutely. But that's why I also stuck with Blesta. I've had a license for years, but only recently started getting it developed and ready to be migrated to. You can make the actual order forms pretty simple. You can customize the client area theme to be very simple (although some annoying limits exist - Paul said those are being looked at). Don't underestimate how hard it is to create a hosting automation panel. At my previous company, it took us over 4 years and an engineering team of 10+ people to develop something, and even then it wasn't close to perfect. A lot of UX/UI issues, bugs galore, feature creep, having it function well for multiple departments. It was a massive headache and a huge money pit. Even the import process, which we built ourselves, had many glitches, and this after hundreds of dry run tests. In my opinion, with hindsight being 20/20, we could have taken an off-the-shelf solution, like Blesta, strip it of everything except the billing core, and build from it. The reason I stick with Blesta now is that the code is open. If something were to happen to Blesta, for whatever reason, I wouldn't need to get everything recoded, changing database schemas, importing hundreds of thousands of database lines and tables, services.. anyway you get the picture. And in the meantime, I pay them a very small yearly amount, and they update the software. You can read some of my posts in this forum. I feel I'm very fair in my criticism of what Blesta does wrong, but at the same time, it's not all bad and horrible. It's a decent system, and right now, as it stands, it's up to you to develop it into what you want. It takes a bit of money and time, but it can be done. Just don't underestimate how hard it is to build your own billing system

I'd like to be able to generate churn reports via Blesta. I know it's easy to do basic calculations with overview data, but I need to break it down further : Ability to see churn by: - product / service - customer segment / group - time period - customer longevity - coupon / discount code used - total churn by revenue amounts - once the affiliate and referral system is in place, churn by the affiliate/referral A nice to have would be to see churn based on the amount of support tickets a customer opened. I think i hit all the major ones I need. Not sure on everyone else's needs.

proof? just go look at every news release, official interview, etc from any company and look at how the outlet spells the company name. I really don't care enough to continue this discussion, but the proof is all around you. Every major company that understands branding and how important it is does it. Look at cPanel. Anything officially related to cPanel is written cPanel. Press releases, interviews they give. Yahoo is the same. WordPress. I'm not sure what kind of proof you're looking for when it's right in front of you.

Oh, okay, we're talking about the same thing, but not voicing it the same way. I didn't phrase it correctly when i said cost to you. It's what you charge the customer, and then credit the customer. Your toothbrush example is exactly right. On the receipt, it'll show $2.00 for the toothbrush, and then -$2.00 for the credit. And then those transactions are placed in the accounting software to balance things out

trust me, the company itself cares. That's why their branding is what it is. They're not going to go on a witch hunt and correct every spelling across the internet. But their own branding materials, press releases, interviews, you'll always see the right branding. The company will almost always correct an article or press release about them if they see it.

it's a branding thing. If you're intent on becoming well known, your branding needs to match everywhere, including upper, lower case, font style, colors, and everything else that goes into your branding package. Companies pay big money for that. Think cPanel. It's cPanel. Not Cpanel or cpanel or CPANEL. cPanel. There's a reason why they did that and continued to make it part of their brand

I'm confused. For my accounting, the billing software needs to show that 1 - the domain had X cost initially, and 2 - it was credited with X amount. It's not just about your cost both parts of that transaction should be shown. It's a paper trail.

Thanks I have a few requests I'd like to see implemented, but I'll hold back until 4.0 hits so you don't need to waste coding time. It would be nice to have an encrypted ticket DB. I know it sucks on a MySQL load front, but all these companies being hacked and their DB's leaked is a serious concern. We can't control what customers put in tickets, so full on encryption rather than just 1 field would be good. There will be hardware ways to speed up the search anyway. A separate mysql server running on SSD, or a duplicated mysql server that is accessible only from an internal ip without any other load on it. When we started getting too many tickets for the server's hardware to handle search, we duplicated the DB every few hours, and ran all the search queries against that DB. it improved performance a lot. So I'm sure we can all think of ways to make an encrypted support database work.

Open to everyone who'd like to answer this. How hard would it be to code in custom auto-replies (and option to enable / disable auto-replies)? The more data that gets migrated into Blesta, and as departments get used, there's a big annoying problem, and that's auto-replies. Not everything is a support request. So how hard and how long would it take to code what I'd like in?

well right off the bat, you set it to use IMAP, not piping Set it to piping, and you'll see Blesta give you a one line command to enter as an email forwarder in your cpanel account I don't agree on 777 chmod permissions either. Unless your host is not doing their job correctly. PHP files should never be set to 777 in a cPanel environment. You're just asking to be hacked. 644 for all files, 755 if you really need to.

Make sure MailParse is installed, and enabled in php properly. This is an error most people don't see even though it's right in front of them. MailParse doesn't come enabled in cPanel installations automatically. Make sure the department email matches the email you want to pipe to. So if you want to pipe support@company.com - make sure the department email is set to support@company.com Make sure your forwarder is set to the right file path that Blesta gives you when setting the department up Make sure your file permissions are correct. 644 or 755 for pipe.php depending on your environment. Make sure the hasbang is in the pipe.php file. That info can be found in this forum and in the Blesta docs.

totally agree Everyone has a right to their opinion. Take the stuff you can work with from it, strip the other stuff out, and move forward. In business, not only do you need a thick skin, but you need to be smart enough to be able to take actual data / points from an opinion, even one that you don't agree with, and take it under consideration.

Thanks Paul. Trying to avoid editing core files since that gets messy with updates.

In customizing Blesta's client area, my developer ran into a problem. We can't re-order the listing of tables that Blesta presents the customer. Basically, no matter what, the order that shows up is : Invoices Services Transactions The problem is, I believe customers care more about their services than they do staring at invoices first, never mind transactions. I get that this isn't true for every business, but that's what I've come across the most. In 4.0, can Blesta please allow us to re-order the tables it presents in the client dashboard, and even better, hide/add them as we need them and those of plugins too.

if i can add onto that feature request, make the button greyed out / disabled, but also add a spinning circle. That way the customer has a visual cue that the system is working, and the button is not just disabled. They might end up refreshing the page instead and doing it again.

Hi Paulo Does this module support not sending auto-replies by department? For example, department 1 sends no auto-reply, department 2 sends one? Currently this is a problem with the implementation of the default support module. It's not critical, but annoying enough that I have to look for alternatives. If the module does not support this, how hard would it be to code it in?

so how does your accounting work? The domain costs you money, but Blesta is reporting it as being worth 0? Sorry guys for the tangent discussion!

does the customer see the domain being credited on their invoice? That's important