Integrating our Integrations: Getting WHMCS and cPanel Talking

CloudFlare provides integrations for several of the most popular hosting control panels and billing systems such as WHMCS, cPanel, and Plesk. Each of these integrations provide a simple interface for our partners’ customers to sign-up for CloudFlare and start adding domains almost immediately.

But what about partners that use more than one system? The best experience occurs when we can get our integrations talking to each other, as our recently updated WHMCS and cPanel plugins do.

Integration Basics

All of our hosting integrations speak directly to CloudFlare through our host API. With just a single click, the integration passes the necessary information for CloudFlare to create an account and provision the domain. We respond when the provisioning completes, and the integration finishes the setup by making the necessary changes locally (adding and adjusting several DNS records) to route traffic to the domain through CloudFlare.

This makes signing up through a hosting partner integration even easier than signing up directly with CloudFlare. These proven systems make DNS changes accurately in order to save a lot of headaches.

Where do I integrate CloudFlare?

Many hosting companies expose two different applications to their customers: a billing system and a hosting control panel. The Continue reading

Flexible SSL & WordPress: Fixing “Mixed Content” Errors

As many are aware, CloudFlare launched Universal SSL several months ago. We saw lots of customers sign up and start using these new, free SSL certificates. For many customers that didn’t already have an SSL certificate, they were able to use “Flexible SSL”.

Flexible SSL creates a secure (HTTPS) connection between the website visitor and CloudFlare and then an in-secure (HTTP) connection between CloudFlare and the origin server. For any site using absolute links to assets (i.e. javascript, css, and image files), this can lead to a “Mixed Content” error.

Mixed Content = Mixed Protocol

What is “Mixed Content”? This can be understood as mixed protocol. When the webpage is loaded over SSL (HTTPS protocol), most browsers expect all of the assets to be loaded over the same protocol. Some browsers will display an error about loading “insecure content” while others will just block the insecure content outright.

This error only applies to pages loaded over SSL, since the browser is working to make sure that secure pages only load equally secure assets.

Wordpress Plugin Updates

The latest version of the CloudFlare plugin for Wordpress works to resolve a lot of these errors by altering the protocol within the Continue reading