Separate Order and Client Areas, Billing Hourly

[CamdenJaxx]

Hello! Two quick questions before I dive into Blesta:

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My company will design and host websites, though not all hosted websites will be designed by my company. Billing for hosting isn't an issue, as I'm sure Blesta can handle this with little effort. Can it be setup to offer other services?

Can Blesta handle billing for additional (design) services? If so, does the additional service need to be flat-out pricing ($500.00 for design) or can it be billed with multiple hourly segments ($50.00 per hour x 4 for design, $25.00 per hour x 2 for maintenance)?

Lastly, can the invoice for the design services be independent of the invoice for the hosting services?

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One of the things that's always bugged me has been the naming/url of the client area; simply put, if I have yet to order, I am not a client. So my question is this: is there a way that I can separate the order and client areas?

Instead of having everything under one area (https://clients.domain.com), I'd like to have the client portal (https://clients.domain.com) away from the order form (https://order.domain.com).

I'm using subdomains for simplicity here, though I'm not sure this is exactly the way I'd want it structured. For arguments sake, let's say that the client portal is on it's own subdomain (https://clients.domain.com) and the order form on a front-facing page (https://domain.com/order). The idea would be to allow the visitor to order without being forwarded over to the client section unless they've completed the order.

Can this be accomplished using Blesta?

Thank you for your time!

[Mr Genius]

This would be very interesting to see.

Unless this is supported, you deploy 2 instances of blesta, one on the sub domain, while the other one on the main website link /order and set both of them to use the same databse as the backedn, so that everything is the same.

Then have a scenarios where on the website everyone is sent to the order side, while you give the clients the client.domain.com for their login area. Unless there is a better way for that.

[CamdenJaxx]

Thanks for the reply, Mr Genius!

I assumed that I'd have to place two instances of Blesta onto the domain, but recalled seeing a post (somewhere) about being able to pull the order form from Blesta and displaying it outside of the working directory. Just wanted to check and see if it was possible to do so without needing both instances, but I'm open to it if necessary to achieve the desired effect.

[Paul]

If there is no concern about the URL after the subdomain, then you could just configure both subdomains to point to the same document root and link to them accordingly. You can also update the route to the client area (see https://docs.blesta.com/display/user/Configuration+Files#ConfigurationFiles-routes.php) so it wouldn't be at clients.domain.com/clients but clients.domain.com/somethingelse

Client facing URLs are not license validated, only admin areas, so using multiple subdomains wouldn't present a problem to clients or potential clients.

However, I would recommend using a single non-descript hostname like account.domain.com or my.domain.com and simply update routes to the client, admin, and other URLs accordingly. This is least likely to cause issues.