Customers always expect a seamless experience while using their control panel. And hosting providers compete with each other in ensuring user friendliness.

In billing solutions like WHMCS, theme customization greatly helps in achieving this.

Also, choosing a custom theme largely impacts the look and feel of the client area.

That’s why, at Bobcares, we often get requests from our customers to setup WHMCS theme customization as part of our Server Management Services.

Today, we’ll see how our Support Engineers set up them & fix the related issues.

Why we customize the theme in WHMCS?

Customizing theme plays an important role in business.

The main motto is to create a user-friendly area to manage the services & makes the product accessible in one click. Additionally, it helps to incorporate custom brand images related to your business.

To accomplish this, the WHMCS client area supports an easy way to set up a custom theme.

How we customize WHMCS theme

WHMCS theme provides an attractive & friendly interface for users.

Let’s see how our Support Engineers take the following steps to create a custom theme.

1. First, we log in to WHMCS site with proper credentials.

2. Then, we create a custom folder under (/modules/addons/appprovisionwhmcs/packages/mycustom).

3. Next, we import a copy the contents of the custom folders to your WHMCS site under (/modules/addons/appprovisionwhmcs/packages/[customwhmcspackage]/files/).

4. After that, we navigate to Setup > General Settings > General Tab & change the Template to Six theme.

5. Next, open your base page and copy from the top to the begin of content output to header.tpl file under the website’s root directory.

This includes the line of codes for meta charset, view cart button, navigation menus, phone number input style.

6. Then, copy from the end of the content output to the end of the page & copy to footer.tpl file.

7. At last, we save the changes to both template files.

Now the user can preview the new template, by accessing the URL https://www.yourdomain.com/pathtocustomtemplate.

Troubleshooting WHMCS custom theme

Even after customizing theme in WHMCS, we often see some errors.

Let’s take a closer look at what are the causes & how our Support Engineers fixed it.

1. Blank page

Recently one of our customers reported us after completing the WHMCS upgrade, he got a blank page that showed a fatal PHP error and stopped to continue the execution.

To solve this problem our Support Engineers took the following steps.

1. First, we logged in to WHMCS panel.

2. We checked the Activity log by navigating to Utilities > Logs > Activity Log.

3. By analyzing, we found that the problem was with the PHP module which was not specified in the template.

4. Then, we navigated to Setup > General Settings > Security & enabled it.

5. Finally, we saved the settings.

That fixed the problem & the user could no longer get a rendered page.

2. Problems in the client area

Likewise, if the admin area is loading correctly and only the client area is showing blank pages.

This indicates that the template folder is missing or the /templates_c folder have an invalid path set or due to wrong permission settings.

To get around this, we perform the following steps.

In such cases, we re-select template under Setup > General Settings and click Save Changes. This reloads the missing template folder.

Also, we ensure the templates_c folder has the appropriate permissions and ownership values so it’s writable by the script (usually we set chmod 755, but in some environments, chmod 777 may be required).

If the /templates_c directory has been moved to a custom location we ensure the path is correct in the configuration.php file. Your server admin/hosting provider will be able to confirm this.

[Having trouble with WHMCS theme customization? We’ll fix it for you.]

Conclusion

To be more precise, WHMCS supports theme customization to create a user-friendly client area. Today, we saw how our Support Engineers configured “WHMCS theme customization” & fixed the common errors.