Introduction

Welcome to the last part of our WHMCS General Settings tutorial. This tutorial will review the last tab from the General Settings, namely, the “Other” tab. Inside, you will discover many settings that you can find handy in certain situations, such as marketing email settings, error reporting, and various settings related to client information fields.

Of course, WHMCS has plenty of configuration choices under the General Settings, and we will examine them in the rest of our WHMCS tutorials in the series.

Getting Started

To access the General Settings, please log inside your WHMCS admin area. After you log in, please point your attention to the top right corner. There you will see the wrench icon. Please click on it, and then click on the "System Settings" option from the revealed icons. 

This action will redirect you to the "System Settings" page, where you will see all the available WHMCS settings. 

To access the "General Settings," please click on the "General Settings" content box, which will be the first option under the "All Settings" title.

Other Tab

To access the "Other" tab, please click on the "Other" tab on the right side of the "Social" tab. The final tab will allow you to set up various settings that the other tabs missed or did not include.

Let's review each setting separately and get to know them better.

• Marketing Emails - Please use this tickbox to control the opt-in/out functionality for marketing emails you send via a mass-mailing tool, for example. This feature will also enable the "Newsletter Opt-In"  tickbox on your checkout/registration pages.
• Require User Opt-In - Please use this radio button to enable or disable mandatory opt-in for marketing emails before users can sign-up. Users are required by default to opt-in for such emails.
• Marketing Email Opt-In Messaging - Please use this content box to write the message that customers will see in the client area when they opt-in for marketing emails.
• Admin Client Display Format - Please use the radio button to select the format in which the customer's name is displayed within the Client Area. The options are as follows:
• Show first name/last name only.
• Show company name if set, otherwise, first name/last name.
• Show full name & company if set.
• Default to Client Area - Please use this checkbox to enable or disable WHMCS redirections to the Client Area’s logins screen. When disabled, visitors will be taken straight to the WHMCS homepage, where they will see a listing of all your other pages.
• Disable Client Area User Management - Please use this tickbox to enable or disable existing customers from adding and managing users in their accounts. 
• Allow Client Registration - Please use this checkbox to allow or prevent customers from registering without purchasing a product. We highly recommend keeping this setting disabled.
• Client Email Preferences - Please use this tickbox to allow or prevent customers from choosing which emails they want to receive from WHMCS. They will have checkboxes on their Client Area profile page where they can select their desired email types.
• Optional Client Profile Fields - Please use the checkboxes here to select which of the customer's profile details are optional. For example, you can choose only the phone number and make that optional instead of a mandatory field during registration or sign-up. However, please note that some registrars have requirements in terms of client information to register a domain name, so you need to consider that before making these fields optional. 
• Locked Client/User Profile Fields - Please use these tickboxes to lock specific customer information fields and prevent clients from editing them by themselves. They would need to contact a WHMCS agent to do that instead.
• Client Details Change Notify - Please use this checkbox to enable notifications when users change their contact details, such as their address, phone, or country.
• Show Cancellation Link - Please use this tickbox to enable "Cancellation Requests". Customers can submit cancellations for products they are no longer willing to use.
• Monthly Affiliate Reports - Please use this checkbox to enable emails concerning monthly affiliate reports.
• Banned Subdomain Prefixes - Please use this text field to add sub-domains you want to prevent customers from using during registration. The default ones should suffice. However, you can add more to the list using a comma as a delimiter.
• Encoded File Loading - Please use this radio button to enable or disable encoded file loading. By default, WHMCS will not normally load Custom PHP assets like hooks or widgets if the encoded file is either unknown or incompatible with the environment.
• Event Handling - Please use this radio button to choose an event-handling method used by WHMCS. An event happens when specific criteria are met - an example is having an application installed for the primary domain for an account when a customer completes an order. Event handling has three options:
• Concurrent (Launch an asynchronous request.) - Please select this option to run events as asynchronous requests along with the process that caused them.
• Inline (Handle events within the same request.) - Please select this option to run events with the same request as the process that triggered them.
• Cron (Defer events until the next cron run.) - Do not execute events until the next cron run occurs.
• Display Errors - Please use this checkbox to disable or enable errors in your browser. Ensure this is disabled for production websites and only turned on when you are troubleshooting.
• Log Errors - Please use this tickbox to enable logging for PHP errors in the respective error_log, along with any other errors that may appear from WHMCS. We recommend keeping this disabled unless you are troubleshooting PHP-related errors.
• SQL Debug Mode - Please use this checkbox to enable database-related error logging. In most cases, you will need to enable this if you have contacted the WHMCS staff for advanced troubleshooting. Otherwise, we recommend keeping it disabled.
• Hooks Debug Mode - Please use this tickbox to enable action hook activity logging. Useful when troubleshooting errors related to your WHMCS hooks. We recommend keeping it disabled unless explicitly needed.

Once you have chosen the desired settings on this page, please click on the blue “Save Changes” button located at the bottom of the page. Otherwise, please click the grey “Cancel Changes” button on the right side of it to revert them.

This ends our overview of the available options under the WHMCS “Other” tab. We hope you found a use case for these settings and that you were able to successfully reach your goals by implementing them.

Conclusion

This ends our WHMCS tutorial series and our in-depth look at all configuration options under the WHMCS General Settings. If you found this tutorial useful, you should definitely check out the rest of our tab overviews under our WHMCS tutorial category.