It will be no surprise to the folks running Domain of One’s Own (DoOO) on their campus, but Reclaim has been in the process of rolling out a welcome upgrade to our flagship product. The long and the short of it is we’ve eliminated one-third of the trinity of software we’ve been using to run DoOO. From the beginning, we have used WHM (the cPanel server software) in combination with WHMCS (the software that allows us to automate the creation of cPanel accounts), and finally WordPress as a wrapper that integrates the WHMCS middleware for sign-ups and embeds the cPanel dashboard in a WordPress page. The use of WordPress was strategic because it allowed us to leverage various plugins, particularly those that help manage single sign-on (SSO). This makes DoOO an integrated tool that allows us to automate sign-up for web hosting accounts through cPanel using SSO. This has worked well for the last 13 years or so, but one of the major pain points has been the middleware WHMCS because a) it’s terrible software, and b) as a result of the previous point, it’s confusing for DoOO admins to use. Our systems administrator and team lead, Chris Blankenship, got so tired of WHMCS during his eight-year tenure that eighteen months ago he decided to write it out of the equation—for everyone’s benefit. You gotta love the possibilities that can be born of frustration and sheer contempt for bad software Anyway, it’s Chris’s world; I’m just living in it. He wrote a fairly extensive post at the end of May narrating his journey toward rebuilding an entire element of DoOO, and he was finally comfortable hitting publish because we’d had DoOO v2 in production on several servers for more than six months by late May. As of now, both Chris and Taylor Jadin are working on rolling upgrades to all our DoOO servers over the next several months, and if all goes well, by 2027 we will be all but free of WHMCS for DoOO. For the time being we’re still stuck with it for shared hosting, but hope springs eternal. “Why make this change?” you ask? Well, there are many reasons, but let me list a few below because everyone loves a bulleted list: WHMCS has proven to be increasingly terrible software over time (did I say this already?) Fewer pieces of software in the mix means less complexity for DoOO admins. Fewer pieces of software in the mix means a smaller surface area for malicious attacks against the product. Chris has essentially built the functionality of WHMCS into a WordPress plugin, which means DoOO is now theme-independent. That was not previously possible without a lot of overhead. This eliminates a significant amount of the monthly subscription fees we pay to WHMCS, which means we’re not constantly being forced to readjust pricing based on vendor increases. This kind of economic independence is huge for a small company like ours. It also opens the door to eventual product agnosticism, given that the plugin already integrates with cPanel alternatives like DirectAdmin, CyberPanel, and Virtualmin. So, should there come a day when we need to pivot for whatever reason, there is a potential path forward. But I’ll end with a quote from Chris’s post on version 2 because he sums up where we’re at with DoOO v2 beautifully: I have no delusions that everything is resolved or that this is the most perfect WordPress plugin ever written. We’ll always be finding things to fix or make better. That’s just how software development works; it’s a continuous process. And I’m excited for this process to continue to make DoOO safer, simpler, and more stable.