Cowritten by Lauren Hanks and Katie Hartraft.
Using WHMCS it is possible to have one cPanel managed by multiple users, as well as to have multiple cPanels managed by one user. This article will teach you how to do both.
One cPanel Managed by Multiple Users
Note before beginning: cPanel does not natively have a way to support multiple administrators. This guide is a Domain of One’s Own workaround and is not perfect.
Let’s say you have 3 professors that need admin access to a departmental cPanel account called history.stateu.org.
First, make sure Professors 1, 2, and 3 have all signed into your main DoOO Portal at least once, even if they haven’t created their own cPanel account yet. The act of logging in and authenticating with the system creates a user profile in WHMCS where the cPanel can then be associated with their account.
If Professors 1, 2, and 3 already have their own individual cPanel accounts, that is not a problem. The new cPanel you add to their account will become an additional account that they can toggle between as you'll see below in the "Multiple cPanels Managed by One User" section. If they don’t already have an account, the new cPanel will be the first thing they see when they sign in via single sign on.
Step One
This guide assumes that the cPanel account is already created (let’s say it’s in Professor 1’s account & you now need to give access to Professor 2 & 3).
In WHMCS, go to the Product/Service tab for the cPanel account to which you want to give the additional users access. Then, copy and save the cPanel username and password, or keep this page open in a separate tab in your browser to reference later.
Step Two
Navigate to the WHMCS profiles for the additional users who need access (i.e. Professors 2 & 3).
For each user, you’ll want to go to their Summary tab and click Add New Order.
Step Three
On the new order page, uncheck the Order Confirmation, Generate Invoice, and Send Email options.
Select the appropriate Product/Service from the dropdown options if there is more than one.
Then, add the domain name for the cPanel you are adding them to in the domain field (ilovedomains.stateu.org in this case).
Finally, set the billing cycle to annual. (NOTE: If the school charges for these accounts set the Billing Cycle to Free.)
After that, click ‘Submit Order’ and then you should be taken to the Manage Orders
page:
Step Four
Once you are on the Manage Orders page, you'll want to replace the username and password that were automatically generated with the ones we saved from the original cPanel in Step One.
Then, uncheck Run Module Create. This is important; be sure that the Run Module Create option is NOT selected.
The cPanel account already exists on the server so running Module Create doing so will essentially recreate the cPanel account and erase existing content.
The last step would be to click Accept Order.
Once the order is active within a user’s WHMCS account, that user will be able to manage the cPanel next time they log in with Single Sign On. You can complete this process with as many project admins as you’d like.
Since this is a workaround, take not that if you make changes to the domain or the cPanel password via one of the WHMCS profiles, you’ll want to make sure you save the same settings in all of the other connected profiles as well.
Multiple cPanels Managed by One User
In order for a user to manage more than one cPanel, the user simply needs two or more orders in WHMCS. WHM will then pull that information into the user’s cPanel. If you need help creating a new order, take a look at this guide here.
Multiple product/services in WHMCS will look like this:
Meanwhile, in cPanel, the user will see a toggle that looks like this at the very bottom of their cPanel screen:
The user can then use this toggle to move between cPanels.
Reclaim has this functionality available on most of our DoOO servers currently, but it may not yet have rolled out to everyone. If you run into this scenario often and do not have this toggle showing up, let us know & we’ll get it added to your school’s server.