I’ve been reticent to announce it publicly given that this is very much Chris Blankenship’s handiwork, but since he’s finally posted about all his amazing work on his own blog, I figure it’s fair game.
First and foremost, all hail our sysadmin and Reclaim’s longest-tenured employee: Chris Blankenship. Chris is a punk rock bassist, multi-lingual vegan,* who’s also an all-around awesome Reclaimer! One of the things we’ve been luckiest with during our 13-year run at Reclaim Hosting is having great employees who have remained with us for significant stretches of time. Chris is a great example of how investing in awesome folks pays off for everyone, particularly our clients in the case of DoOO V2.
Anyway, what is DoOO V2, and why should you care? Most importantly, it makes administering a DoOO instance significantly easier. It accomplishes this by taking all the elements we previously relied on WHMCS for and baking them directly into a plugin. So rather than depending on three pieces of software for DoOO (WordPress, WHMCS, and WHM), it now requires only two. What’s more, you can do almost everything from the WordPress backend—a familiar environment for our users.
This also means users can decide what theme they want to use with their DoOO instance without worrying about breaking anything. It’s all about eliminating confusion and potential problems for admins. These are improvements long overdue for DoOO, and something Chris took into his own hands because his patience had finally run out with WHMCS. See, bad software can result in good things 🙂
Beyond making things simpler for users by removing WHMCS from the equation, we’ve also eliminated a potential attack vector, which arguably makes the platform safer.
But more than anything, the fact that in a year’s time we are ready to roll this out to all DoOO instances over the next several months is truly exciting. This is the biggest improvement to our flagship product since Reclaim Hosting started, and we owe it all to a UMW graduate—there’s some poetry in that fact—who took things into his own hands and learned to code so he could realize the improvements we’d all been talking about for years.
We ran our first well-attended workshop for admins last month, led by Taylor Jadin, and we have another scheduled next week. After those two sessions, more than half of our admins will be trained (which, in practice, means a walkthrough of a few panels in a WordPress plugin), and we’ll start rolling it out for schools as soon as this month.
This is really exciting not only because it makes things better, but also because it points to a moment at Reclaim when we’re able to develop alternatives to hedge-fund-owned proprietary software.â€
*Mentioning he’s vegan was one of the pre-conditions for him letting me write this post 🙂
†Which reminds me that Chris has built a software-agnostic feature that will work with hosting solutions beyond cPanel, such as DirectAdmin or Virtualmin. Who knows, maybe we’ll have our own cPanel alternative one day for folks who want to avoid those constantly increasing prices.
