Although v4.04 is primarily a maintenance release, we've also added a couple new data types to DomainMOD's Custom Fields. In addition to Check Boxes, Text Fields, and Text Areas, you can now add Date (YYYY-MM-DD) and Time Stamp (YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS) custom fields.
Regarding the maintenance part of the release, pretty much everything is behind-the-scenes, but if you're curious this is what we updated:
- Updated the 3rd party libraries (Composer, PHP Cron Expression Parser, PHPMailer)
- Changed encoding on emails from iso-8859-1 to UTF-8
- Updated the upgrade scripts to be able to be run from the command line
- Optimized database queries
- Cleaned up various code system-wide
Above.com API support has been added to DomainMOD, so you can now use the Domain Queue to automatically import the domains on your Above.com account.
In addition to the Above.com API being added, we've also updated the WHM API support in the Data Warehouse. Currently you use a Remote Access Key/Hash to access your WHM data via the API, however WHM is replacing the Remote Access Key method in favour of an API Token (The Remote Access Key will be getting removed from WHM in version 68). To prepare for this, we've added the ability to use the new API Token, so if your web server already supports it you should make the switch.
For more information on switching to the API Token please see the Data Warehouse section in the User Guide.
A couple domain registrars that we get asked about regularly when it comes to adding API support are DreamHost and Freenom, and we're happy to announce that both have been added to DomainMOD as of v4.03.001. This means that you can now use the Domain Queue to automatically import your domains from either of these registrars.
NOTE: Although Freenom API support has been added, they only give API access to reseller accounts, so if you have a standard account you will not be able to import your domains using the Domain Queue. Luckily though, upgrading to a reseller account is a very easy process.
Although v4.03 is mostly small updates and tweaks, along with it comes a couple fairly big pieces of news.
The first is that DomainMOD now has an official User Guide, which has been a long time coming. Although we'd had a Getting Started guide online for quite some time, it was missing some information, and the software we used to create it decided to change their fee structure and it was just not feasible for us to use anymore. So with that, we were effectively starting from scratch with our documentation, and the hunt for a new piece of software had begun. Unfortunately this search was sidetracked numerous times and was delayed far longer than we had hoped, however the search is finally over! After an exhaustive search and lots of testing we've chosen a piece of open source software called MkDocs, which has everything we were looking for. Even if the MkDocs project shuts down for some reason, the version we have now should work for us until the end of time, so we no longer have to worry about our documentation software throwing us a curveball that causes us to completely redo our documentation system.
The User Guide is still a work in progress, and more documentation will be added as time goes on. Some sections are fairly bare at the moment, as we thought it would be best to at least get some documentation created, as opposed to waiting for it to be 100% complete before publishing it. Please bear with us as we continue to expand the guide.
The second piece of news, which we're very excited about, is that as of yesterday (Friday, April 7th, 2017) DomainMOD is now available in Softaculous. Softaculous is the web hosting industry's leading software auto-installer, and it has helped millions of users install applications with a few clicks of a mouse. Softaculous easily integrates into the leading control panels like cPanel, Plesk, DirectAdmin, InterWorx, H-Sphere, and more. This means that any web server that runs a control panel with Softaculous can now install DomainMOD with ease. The User Guide has some more information regarding how to install using Softaculous.
One of the most requested features lately has been SMTP support, so that you can use an external SMTP server to send system emails instead of using the built-in PHP mailer on your DomainMOD server, and I'm happy to announce that this feature is now available as of v4.02. SMTP support was added via the PHPMailer class, which is a very stable code library that has been in development since 2001.
Along with adding SMTP support and a whole bunch of other features, PHPMailer also gives DomainMOD the ability to send Multi-part MIME messages, which means every email can be sent in both HTML as well as Text format, all at the same time. Due to this upgrade in DomainMOD's mailing system, I've updated all of the system emails to send as Multi-part MIME, so if you can't read HTML emails you'll be able to read the Text version. This will also be done for every system email that gets added to DomainMOD in the future.
Sending via SMTP is not enabled by default, since DomainMOD will first need your SMTP server and account details. To enable SMTP you need to login to DomainMOD as an administrator, open System Settings on the Administration menu, and then fill in your details in the SMTP Server Settings section.
Fabulous recently updated their API to allow you to retrieve a domain's WHOIS privacy status and auto renewal status, so the Fabulous API call in the Domain Queue has been updated in v4.01.001 to reflect this information. This means that when you retrieve your domain details from Fabulous using the Domain Queue, the main DomainMOD database will now get populated with the domain's WHOIS privacy status and auto renewal status.
v4.01.001 has also been updated to allow you to designate read-only users, so if you want to give someone access to your DomainMOD installation but you don't want them to be able to add or edit any of your data, you can now do so.
One of the biggest hurdles to getting started with DomainMOD is manually adding all of your domains, but with the release of v4.01 that's about to change.
The newest version of DomainMOD has support for registrar API imports, so if you have access to your domain registrar's API, you can now import your domains automatically. All you need to do save your API credentials along with your registrar account asset in DomainMOD, use the Domain Queue to start the import, and that's it, everything else is done for you.
Currently Supported Registrars: DNSimple, Dynadot, eNom, Fabulous, GoDaddy, Internet.bs, Name.com, NameBright, Namecheap, NameSilo, OpenSRS, ResellerClub
If you use a registrar that isn't already supported, and they have an API, send us an email at suggestions@domainmod.org and we'll see what we can do about adding it.
NOTE: In order to use the Domain Queue you must setup the cron job that comes with DomainMOD. For more information please see the DomainMOD README.
It's with great excitement that I announce the release of DomainMOD v4. It's been a long road filled with many hours of programming, but it's finally here.
One of the biggest changes in v4 is that, thanks in part to the AdminLTE template/framework, DomainMOD has a completely new design, bringing it up-to-date in terms of look and feel. The old design wasn't exactly ugly, but... well, ok, it was pretty ugly, but it got the job done. I was more focused on how the software worked than how it looked, but it was finally time to change that.
Along with the new design comes a whole new backend code base built upon Twitter Bootstrap, jQuery, DataTables, and other popular libraries and plugins. In other words, DomainMOD now has some solid, well-established software behind it, and it's ready to evolve in the years to come.
One of the things I'm most excited about with v4 is that it's now completely mobile friendly. Sure DomainMOD worked on mobile before, but it wasn't optimized for mobile, and it definitely wasn't the most friendly application to use on a small screen. Now however, thanks to Twitter Bootstrap and DataTables, that's all changed.
There are countless changes and updates that have been made in v4 over the past few months. From a dashboard that gives you a snapshot of your installation data, to more responsive and feature-rich tables, DomainMOD is pretty much a new piece of software, but with all of the tried and true features still intact.
If you would like to give v4 a try before installing or upgrading your existing DomainMOD installation, just head on over to the live demo and give it a try.
Just like the title says, the Domain & SSL Certificate Renewal Reports have been removed from the Reporting section. They're gone. Done. Kaput.
But why?! That's crazy, those reports are helpful!! Why would you do such a ridiculous thing?! I want to kick you in the shins for doing this!!
Basically, because they were now completely and utterly useless. These reports let you filter your Domains & SSL Certificates by their expiry date, so that you could see which domains were expiring for a given date range, however I have now added an expiry date filter to the Domain & SSL Certificate search pages, making these reports redundant. All they were doing now was wasting space, so they have been completedly removed.
Thanks to this new feature, getting a list of your upcoming expirations is now faster and easier than ever!
Although most of the past few months have been spent cleaning up and overhauling the DomainMOD source code, there are also some new features that have been implemented that I wanted to highlight.
Task Scheduler & Cron Jobs
In order to streamline how DomainMOD handles scheduled tasks, all of the past cron jobs have now been combined into a single file, so users only need to schedule one file to run at regular intervals and then all automated tasks can be managed through the new Task Scheduler (Settings -> Task Scheduler).
Support For User-Based Time Zones
The entire DomainMOD system has been updated to show times in the user's time zone, not the system time zone. This means that all dates shown, including the timestamps in exported reports, will be shown in the user's current default time zone (Settings -> User Defaults).
Raw List Feature
The main Domain & SSL Certificate pages now have a Raw List feature, which allows you to view your search results as a simple list of domains with no other data. This is helpful when you need to copy/paste the list of domains somewhere else and you don't need any other data other than the domains themselves.
System Notice Feature
DomainMOD now includes a System Notice feature, which will display important system messages to users when they login.
For a complete list of all changes please visit the Changelog.
In an effort to get DomainMOD ready for the future, the primary source code repository on GitHub has been moved to a new account and location.
I plan to make DomainMOD modular, so that you can easily add new plugins that extended the functionality, and having this new account will allow me to keep all of the code (whether it's the main source code or the individual plugins) in one central location so that it's easy for people to find.
New DomainMOD GitHub Account:
https://github.com/domainmod
New Source Code Repository:
https://github.com/domainmod/domainmod
New .ZIP Archive Download:
https://github.com/domainmod/domainmod/archive/master.zip
If you installed DomainMOD via git, and you want to be able to upgrade using 'git pull' in the future, you will need to edit your .git/config file to reflect the new repository location. Just replace 'aysmedia' in the URL with 'domainmod', save your config file, and that's it, you're all set!
DomainMOD now includes a cron job that will check to see if there's a newer version available for download, which will help keep your installation up-to-date without having to check the website regularly.
Since new versions are sometimes released to fix security issues and bugs, it's highly recommended that you upgrade to the newest version as soon as possible so that you can start taking advantage of this new upgrade notification feature.
NOTE: Only administrators will be notified of newer versions.