After a quick look around at various layouts for packages/websites as well as being shown a number of examples by one of our designers we’ve noticed that there seems to be an increasing number of sites using the new “portal” theme rather than integrating.

Which to some clients may appear that they are being sent to an entirely different site, as except for the white website title there is little immediate indication., which was one of the contributing reasons we ourselves integrated WHMCS a long while back.

Thought id share some images from the WHMCS 3.5 (now 4.0.2 and still in use) client area, possibly to spark some idea’s or just show some of the options, as WHMCS is for even a novice designer an easy system to customise.

Portal Home Page Image
Support ticket Page Image

I've been using and involved in the WHMCS community for quite a while and I think we have all noticed that more and more people are getting lazy, or maybe more and more people simply don't care.

I personally think that it's much more professional to fully integrate your WHMCS. Also consider that years ago to run a hosting operation you would generally have to create an in house system, and that alone could keep low budget start-ups out of the business. Now anyone with $16/month can get a leased license.

IMO if your site doesn't look like you put actual time/care into it than it generally means that you didn't and mite be projecting the wrong image. Although I personally think that WHMCS is very easy to customize/integrate, you have to consider that there's many others who are 100% capable of running a very successful business, but just don't have the time/specific experience to integrate themselves. In that case I always suggest hiring someone to do it.

On that note. If you've seen the showcase forum at WHMCS you'll likely agree with me that there's a lot of "junk". Don't take this the wrong way csn-uk, but although your integration is 100 times better than most, it to me looks like a $30 header/footer integration.

Again, much better than most, but IMO not really unique. But then again my standards usually far exceed most and it's generally my goal to make WHMCS look/work like an in-house system.

A few words of advise to anyone who has or is looking to integrate WHMCS.. "Don't fit your site to WHMCS, rather fit WHMCS to your site."

As a developer I know the true potential of WHMCS and it's amazing! Absolutely anything can be done if you understand enough of it

I couldn’t agree more, though for different reasons mainly as sending a client to different style or look of website can give the impression that they are being sent to an entirely different site all together.

As far as integrating WHMCS is concerned being a software engineer I found it very simple though am familiar with the languages involved, though the level of integration depends on personal taste, personally altering the entire structure of WHMCS was unappealing as it is an industry standard application for small/medium hosts it allows for clients to easily adapt with little knowledge.

Similarly based on for example changing the right mouse button operations to the left button in an entire office, would cause no end of issues. Although i would agree to there is no end to customisation with WHMCS though in most cases it is still recognisable regardless of the mask placed over it, always find this the case with joomla and other CMS’s very easily identifiable regardless of the level of customisation.

I quite agree siforek, WHMCS is really rather simple to skin, and I agree with the sentement that you should fit whmcs around your site then the other way round, I think whmcs really should offer a plain template that is completely stripped out, I spent a lot of time taking a lot out of the templates and am thinking of going back and refining even further.

The only issue is its quite a bugger at unpgrade time when the clean template would come in useful.

Actually I have a basic template I use to start most of my integrations.. 100% Xhtml, with a completely blank stylesheet. You start from that and will end up with a much cleaner result.

As for upgrades.. Matt has been kind enough recently to inform us all upon upgrades of the specifics of any template changes. So long as you know that than it's quite easy, and could take 2-5 minutes to update your template if you need to at all

Wise words. Any website that represents a business should have the WHMCS installation integrated with the overall design. Customers should never get the feeling that they have left the site. The only time I think a different design can be used is if you're running a special promotion and using some sort of landing page.

True. I have some friends getting ready to do a WHMCS integration and have it totally customized and integrated into their site.

I personally prefer using WHMCS for the entire site as a CMS

It seems the best option here. If you want to customize you need to be ready for the related problems