Additional Service Information

Publish free-form notes and delivery details on a single service so the customer reads them in their own panel instead of opening a ticket to ask for them.

Reaching the Screen

Open Orders › Services, click the service you want, then pick the Additional Info tab: {admin}/services/detail?id={service}&content=blocks

The tab is added to every service detail screen. It does not depend on the product, on a server module, or on the service status, so it is there on a cancelled service and on a domain as well. What changes from one service to the next is whether the customer ever reaches the result, which the last part of the screen description covers.

What Is on the Screen

The whole tab is a single form. A guidance banner sits at the top, the entries follow as cards in a grid (three per row on a wide screen, two on a medium one, one on a narrow one), and the button that adds a new card sits under the grid with the save button below it.

Guidance Banner

The banner above the grid repeats what the tab is for: "Blocks are displayed in the client area service details. Along with all standard information, it is possible to add further blocks of information to display it to the users." It is a fixed notice, not a warning about the current service, so it looks the same on a service that has entries and on one that has none.

Anatomy of a Block Card

A card carries two writable boxes and two controls. The title line holds the grip handle, the Block Title box and the bin; the Block Contents box sits below it and is five lines tall, growing a scrollbar rather than the card when the text runs longer.

Both boxes are plain text. There is no formatting toolbar, and the customer panel prints what you typed as characters, so markup entered here is displayed literally instead of being rendered. Line breaks are the exception that does carry over: a short list written on separate lines reaches the customer on separate lines.

Neither box is required on its own. A card that carries only a title is kept, and so is a card that carries only content; the customer then sees a heading with no body, or a body with no heading. Only a card whose two boxes are both empty is dropped when the form is saved.

Order and New Cards

The order of the cards on this tab is the order the customer reads them in. Take a card by the grip handle at the left of its title line and drop it in its new place; the neighbouring cards move aside as you drag, and Save Changes becomes active because a moved card counts as a change like any edit.

Add Block appends an empty card at the end of the grid and activates the save button the same way. Nothing has been written at that point, so a card added by accident is undone by leaving the tab without saving.

Where the Customer Sees It

The entries surface on the service page in the client area, under a tab named Additional Info that carries the line "Details and resources our team added for this service". Each entry becomes its own card there: the title becomes the card heading, the content becomes the card body.

That tab exists only while the service carries at least one entry. Clearing the last entry removes the tab from the customer panel rather than leaving an empty section behind.

Two situations keep the entries out of the customer's reach even after a successful save. A domain service is served by a different page in the client area, and that page has no Additional Info section, so an entry written on a domain is stored but never displayed. And when Restrict Service Details is switched on for the service, under Optional Actions & Notes on the Details tab, the customer cannot open the service page at all, so nothing written here reaches them.

Fields

Tasks

Adding an entry

1. Open the service, pick the Additional Info tab and click Add Block under the card grid. An empty card appears at the end of the grid.
2. Type the heading into Block Title and the text into Block Contents. One of the two may stay empty; leaving both empty means the card is discarded.
3. Click Save Changes at the bottom of the form. A confirmation reads "The changes were saved successfully.", and the entry now appears on the customer's service page under Additional Info.

Editing an entry

1. Open the Additional Info tab and edit the title box or the content box directly on the card. There is no separate edit window.
2. Click Save Changes. The button stays inactive until the first keystroke, which is the quickest way to tell whether anything on the tab is still unsaved.
3. The confirmation appears and the customer panel shows the new text on its next page load. No mail and no notification is sent, so tell the customer yourself if the change needs announcing.

Reordering the entries

1. Point at the grip handle at the left of a card's title line and drag the card to where it belongs in the grid.
2. Drop it. The other cards settle into their new places and Save Changes turns active.
3. Click Save Changes. The customer's cards are rebuilt in the order shown here on the next page load.

Removing one entry

1. Click the bin at the end of that card's title line. The card fades out and leaves the grid immediately, with no confirmation prompt, so read the card before you click.
2. Click Save Changes. Until you do, the entry is still stored and the customer still sees it.
3. After the confirmation, the entry is gone from the customer's Additional Info tab as well.

Clearing every entry

1. Remove the cards one by one with the bin. On the last remaining card the bin is no longer offered, which is expected: the form always keeps one card on screen.
2. Empty both boxes of that last card by hand instead of deleting it.
3. Click Save Changes. The blank card is discarded on the way in, the service is left with no entries, and the Additional Info tab disappears from the customer panel.

Things to Watch

Required Privileges

Opening the service detail screen, and with it this tab, needs SERVICES_LOOK or SERVICES_OPERATION. Saving needs SERVICES_OPERATION. The form is drawn for read-only staff as well, save button included, and the attempt is refused by the server rather than by the screen.

Every successful save is written to the activity log as "Service ... blocks have been updated", with the service name and id, so it is visible who last rewrote the list.

Related Articles

• Service Detail Overview
• Service Details
• Service Requirements
• Activity Logs