2018 has been an exciting year for WHMCS. This year we celebrated our 13th anniversary, grew and strengthened our team to 28 and delivered 10 releases, 3 of them major feature releases.

Here's a rundown of the top features we've introduced in 2018:

We introduced PHP 7.1 and 7.2 support back in Version 7.5 in April, enabling you to leverage the improved performance and increased efficiency in the latest versions of PHP and giving users plenty of time to plan and upgrade before the EOL date for PHP 5.6 and 7.0.

With PHP 7.0 having now reached end of life, and PHP 5.6 set to follow in the next few days, it is important to ensure you're keeping up-to-date to ensure you're getting the best possible experience.

Our team is already hard at work ensuring we will be ready to support PHP 7.3 when stable ionCube loaders are released for it.
In the lead up to GDPR coming into effect in May of this year, we did our best to help all the small business owners using WHMCS to be aware of and prepared for the changes that were coming to the EU regulations surrounding the data and privacy of individuals.

Through a number of blog posts, we communicated the key things to be aware of and in WHMCS 7.5, we introduced several features to help with achieving compliance with the new GDPR requirements, including:

• more flexibility and control over how your users opt into marketing emails
• a new consent log that records each time the consent setting is changed
• mass mail functionality that allows you to build and restrict as mass mail email recipient list based on country

WHMCS 7.5 also saw the introduction of staff @mention functionality in support tickets enabling you to mention your team mates in order to notify and loop them into support tickets where needed.

Designed to make internal notes more useful, we hope this feature is helping your team collaborate more efficiently to solve your customer's enquiries as quickly as possible.
As the market leading domain reseller platform, this year we introduced several features that expanded our domain features and functionality to provide an even more powerful and complete solution for you and your customers.

• Domain Grace and Redemption Fee Automation in 7.5 - Now WHMCS will enforce domain grace and redemption rules & fees and enable customers to automatically renew and extend their domain names for longer. With over 200 votes, this was a much requested feature that we were pleased to be able to deliver in v7.5.
• Domain Verification Support in 7.6- In WHMCS 7.6, we made it possible for domain registrar modules to provide greater context around the status of WHOIS changes and domain status to help create a more informative and user friendly experience for end users going through the process of changing domain ownership from one registrant to another.
• Domain Namespinning in 7.6 - this year we introduced several improvements to domain namespinning to help customers find the perfect domain name for them, and drive more domain registrations for you. New functionality included a more powerful suggestion engine, greater relevance with machine learning and multi-language support.

With competitive upgrade, your customers can now purchase SSL certificates from you before their existing SSL Certificate expires without losing any time. Simply order any RapidSSL, GeoTrust or Symantec certificate and if their domain already has an SSL Certificate issued by a qualifying competing vendor, any remaining time is added automatically.
We're always looking at ways to integrate with new service providers to offer WHMCS users access to new and improved services. This year, these have included:
This year we've partnered with website security provider SiteLock and website backup provider CodeGuard to bring you access to resell even more cloud based solutions through MarketConnect.

In v7.6, we also introduced the Weebly Lite Plan which allows customers to try Weebly from as little as $1.99/mo and see just how easy it is to build a website with Weebly's Drag & Drop site builder without a large upfront commitment.

Aside from growing our MarketConnect product range, we've made improvements to the way services are promoted and messaged within the client area, and made available even more free marketing and promotional resources to make selling with MarketConnect as quick, easy and seamless as possible.
We've recently released beta 77, this is a packed release featuring a new Apps and Integrations portal, improvements to Intelligent Search, CodeGuard Website Backup integration, Amazon S3 Support, Drag & Drop Admin Dashboard and many more.

Next year, we will be aiming to deliver 3 major feature releases once again with core features and functionality driven through a combination of requests submitted and voted for via our feature requests site and direct feedback received from users at tradeshows and conferences. Some initial targets for the first release of the new year include Multiple Payment Methods and On-Demand Renewals Support for Products and Services.

We're also looking forward to launching our brand new mobile app which has been re-written from the ground up to provide a cross platform optimised experience for mobile enabling you to take WHMCS wherever you go.

This is an exciting time for the web hosting industry and in an effort to help our customers evolve and grow we plan to continue our work of making available more integrations with cloud based service providers that will enable you to deliver additional value, services and a more complete online solution to your customers.

We hope that WHMCS has helped you automate and scale your business this year. Thank you for choosing us to be part of your journey and we're excited to help you grow through further automation in 2019.