GoCart

GoCart is a custom Laravel 10 checkout application for A2 Hosting, serving as the order form at cart.a2hosting.com. It replaced portions of WHMCS’s built-in order flow with a modern, standalone storefront that communicates with WHMCS through a custom addon module (go_cart) for product data, pricing, authentication, domain operations, and order submission. The application handles shared, VPS, and dedicated hosting product orders with support for multiple currencies, configurable product options, domain registration and transfer, Stripe and PayPal payment processing, and affiliate tracking.

I was the lead architect for GoCart. I worked with a third-party agency (Objectbrewery) who built the initial WHMCS addon module and a proof-of-concept Laravel application. I then did significant work to get the application production-ready and operational, including infrastructure, deployment, backend architecture, monitoring, and ongoing maintenance. Frontend work was handled primarily by A2 Hosting’s marketing team.

My Role

• Lead Architect – Defined the system architecture: a stateless Laravel frontend communicating with WHMCS through a custom addon module API. All persistent state (products, orders, users) lives in WHMCS; GoCart handles presentation, form logic, and payment orchestration.

• Project Initialization – Created the initial Laravel project and established the codebase structure, development environment (direnv, encrypted env files), and dependency management.

• GoCart Library – Built and maintained the core PHP library (app/libraries/GoCart/) that abstracts all WHMCS API communication. This includes the Builder class for fluent order construction, ProductFetcher and ProductSubmitter for API calls, Authenticator for user login, and the Paths URL builder for WHMCS endpoint routing.

• Authentication System – Implemented the authentication flow including proxy IP forwarding (CF-Connecting-IP, X-Real-IP, X-Client-IP, X-Forwarded-For) for accurate fraud detection behind Cloudflare and load balancers.

• Deployment Pipeline – Built the GitHub Actions CI/CD pipeline including production deployment workflows, Deployer configuration with encrypted environment variables, Slack deploy announcements, and rollback via release deletion.

• Playwright Integration – Built the end-to-end test pipeline using Playwright, triggered on deploys through GitHub Actions (8+ PRs iterating on the CI configuration).

• Monitoring and Observability – Configured Sentry for error tracking and performance profiling, including JS SDK integration, sample rate tuning, and heartbeat monitoring.

• Affiliate and Analytics Tracking – Implemented Post Affiliate Pro (PAP) cookie tracking for order attribution, and cookie forwarding for Google Ads (gclid), Microsoft Ads (msclkid), Facebook (fbclid), and analytics platforms (GA, Matomo) from GoCart to WHMCS.

• Currency Support – Added multi-currency support across the product fetching pipeline.

• Code Review – Reviewed and merged contributions from the agency team and other developers.

• Ongoing Maintenance – Bug fixes (CSRF token expiration, blocked domain handling, SSL verification, Facebook cookie handling), dependency management, and operational tuning across nearly two years.

Architecture

GoCart is a stateless Laravel 10 application with no application-specific database tables — all persistent data lives in WHMCS. The application fetches product information, submits orders, and authenticates users by calling endpoints on a custom WHMCS addon module (go_cart).

The core of the codebase is a PHP library that abstracts all WHMCS API interaction behind a clean interface: a fluent order builder for constructing orders with user data, products, promotions, and payment methods; a product fetcher with caching; an authenticator with proxy IP forwarding for fraud detection behind Cloudflare; and a URL builder for WHMCS endpoint routing.

The WHMCS addon module exposes a REST API covering product data and pricing, order validation and placement (Stripe, PayPal, bank transfer), token-based authentication, domain availability and TLD pricing, and locale data. A custom WHMCS report tracks all orders placed through GoCart.

The frontend uses Blade templates with Bootstrap 5, Stripe.js for payment processing, and integrations for analytics tracking, affiliate attribution (Post Affiliate Pro), and live chat.

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