November 1, 2017, New York -- Thanks for subscribing to our newsletter. This is the second edition and we are excited to have you on board!

Welcome to November! We hope you are doing well as we head into late Fall, where around here the air is getting cooler and the nights longer. We've got a lot to talk about so let's get started!

What happened in October?

Before we get to November, we are happy to report that we have accomplished most of what we had planned for October. Here's the rundown...

New Settings section

Profiles is now part of the new Settings section and is where all the action is this month. When you place orders, your credit card and billing address info will be managed from this section. 

• Profile
  • The original purpose of this section still allows you to manage your identity and avatar photo.
• Address Book
  • Managing one or several billing and shipping profiles allows for quick and convenient order processings. 
• Manage Credit Cards
  • Similar to addresses storing your payment profile allows for secure and convenient purchasing without the need to enter your credit card number each time. 
  • NOTE: It's important to know that we do not store any sensitive information on our servers or databases. All information is securely managed by Authorize.net our credit card gateway provider.
  • At the time of this writing, this section has not yet been deployed to production, but it should be ready soon.
• Password Settings
  • Need to change your password? This is where you do it.
• Cancel Membership
  • We hate to see anyone leave but it happens. We make it just as easy to leave as it is to sign up. No questions asked. If you have any active virtual servers or domain name subscriptions we will work with you to make a clean transition to wherever you choose to go.

Joomla! added as new product in Apps

Joomla!, a popular open source community-driven CMS application fits nicely alongside our existing product offerings of Drupal and Concrete5. Joomla's large, active and dedicated community is a major force behind the platform. Joomla comes in as more configurable than Concrete5 and a much shorter learning curve than Drupal. We invite you to give it a try soon.

Joomla! Demo Site

Like the rest of our CMS platforms we have a bare-bones Joomla demo site running so you can see it in action. Check it out at http://joomla.westlinks.net. 

Campaigns, Discounts, Groups - Phase 1

Discounts allow users to add a coupon code to their shopping cart and get either a percentage or fixed amount taken off their price. This is now working and as an example, we are happy to provide you with a promotional demo discount of 10% off of any app installation. Just enter 'NovemberNL' in your shopping cart to get the discount.

Planned for November

• Continue to refine Authorize.net CIM API integration
• Begin Enom API Integration

Authorizenet CIM API Integration

We began this project in October and due to its complexity it is continuing in November. It is worth the time to get it done right. Here's a recap of what CIM is:

Customer Information Manager (CIM) is a part of Authorize.net who is our existing credit card processor. Integrating CIM will allow us to provide more flexible billing. Currently we use Automated Recurring Billing (ARB) which is fine for a single subscription but we expect there to be many cases where customers will add/remove features to their accounts and will want only an adjusted single bill per month rather than a new charge for each feature. This is similar to your cellphone or cable bills where changes in service continue to be reflected on your monthly bill.

Additionally you will be able to maintain the "credit card on file" in your account eliminating the need to re-enter your billing information repeatedly. Note that all user information is securely managed by Authorize.net, not us. This is a high priority project.

Enom API Integration

Enom is the domain name registrar service we use to provide in-app domain name registration directly to our customers. The current state of the integration allows for these features:

• Search for domain names
• Purchase domain names
• Set/unset domain name renewals
  • Unsetting allows a domain name to expire at the next renewal date

The above features are useful but there is a lot more that can and should be made available to our users. Moving forward, we will be adding the following additional features:

• Manage contact information
• Manage host settings
• Manage DNS
• Transfer to/from other registrars
• Purchase SSL certificates
• And more

These are not trivial additions but will add much more value to the Westlinks Online platform. Please note that all of these services are available to you now via customer support. We are happy to facilitate any adjustments to your domain name that you may need. Just ask!