Troubleshooting issues with Admin Interface

Periodically we receive reports from some customers about the admin interface that no longer work as expected. More in particular they describe the following issues:

• IntelliSearch returning no results. Icon won't stop spinning
• Affiliates can't be assigned from Order page
• All modals are empty and never stop loading

We found out that this problem is occurring from version 7.4 of WHMCS but it's possible that older versions are also affected. This is not caused by WHMCS itself or by any of our modules therefore please do not submit a ticket or bug report. Below we are going to describe why it is happening and how you can solve it.

The issue is caused by Display Errors set to On in your PHP configuration. We are going to explain it with an example but keep in mind that it's a bit complicated. You can skip this part if you want to jump to solution.

Let's focus on the IntelliSearch of WHMCS. When you press enter to start the search, WHMCS submits your request to self page. The page then responds with a partially loaded output caused by a PHP notice or warning that leads to an Error 500. WHMCS has no fallbacks to deal with a partially loaded page therefore live search and modals stop working without any notice.

In order to solve the issue you should turn off Display Errors from Plesk, cPanel or webserver in general. This option should always be disabled in production environments not only because it can cause you the problem we have just described but also because it's a security risk.