The Bones Customer Portal: What It Is Being Designed to Do

The short answer

The Customer Portal is the part of Bones 9 being designed so a client organisation can look after what sits behind its site in one place: its installations, the people who use the portal, support tickets and invoices. The Customer Portal is in development: the screens are designed and can be clicked through as a prototype using sample data, and the specification is still a draft. No part of it is approved for production use.

Bones is the web platform we make, and Bones 9 is in development with no release date. This article explains what the portal is being designed to do and where it stands today.

The problem: everything behind a site, in different places

A website comes with more than pages. Behind it there is an account, people who need access, an installation to keep up to date, support when something needs fixing, and billing.

For many organisations those things are scattered. The person who knows where the domain is registered has left. Backups are someone else's job, and nobody is quite sure whose. Support requests sit in one inbox and invoices in another. When something goes wrong, the first half-hour goes on working out where things are and who to ask.

The portal is being designed so a client organisation can see much of it in one place.

What it is being designed to cover

The draft specification sets out each page of the portal. The screens designed so far cover:

• The organisation – an overview of what needs attention, its profile and contacts, and the people who can use the portal.
• Installations – the list of installations; requesting a managed installation or registering a self-hosted one; activation, recovery and transfer. Offering Bones on your own servers is planned, not yet available.
• Entitlements – what the organisation is entitled to, and requesting a change to it.
• Releases – release notes, channels and downloads.
• Domains and going live – the organisation's domains, and going live with a custom domain.
• Backups – evidence of backups and of recovery drills.
• Support – raising, following and replying to tickets.
• Access requests – reviewing requests from our team to access an installation.
• Invoices – invoices, payment status and billing contacts.
• Account settings – profile, notifications and theme.

Some further actions, including inviting users and ordering or paying in the portal, have been proposed but are not decided.

What you would notice

This describes the design, not a guarantee:

• One place for your organisation, separate from each installation's Bones admin; your site's content stays inside each installation.
• Items shown side by side, with no single merged health score.
• Our support team asks before accessing an installation, and you see and answer the request in the portal.
• Commercial records sit next to the installations they relate to.
• A light, dark or system theme.

How it fits with the core and the console

Bones 9 is made of three connected parts. Bones Core is the part every site runs on, where an organisation's content is kept and published. The portal and the Staff Console sit around it.

The portal is the client organisation's side. The console is our team's side. Raising, following and replying to tickets in the portal is designed; how support requests reach our team is still being decided.

Where it stands today

The Customer Portal is in development: the screens are designed and can be clicked through as a prototype using sample data, and the specification is still a draft. No part of it is approved for production use. The Bones 9 customer portal case study records what it covers.

Bones 9 as a whole is in development and is not generally available, and there is no release date. Until it is ready, our larger sites run on Bones 8.0. The Bones page shows the roadmap, and Bones from 8.0 to 9.0 tells the story so far.

What this means for you now

There is nothing to sign up for yet.

Today, a site is looked after through our continuity plans. They are monthly plans on a 12-month agreement. Essential Continuity keeps the site updated and checked, with a monthly health check, minor fixes and email support, Monday to Friday. Governance and Strategic Continuity add more support and review time.

If you want a site built on Bones today, that is done through Bones Implementation, starting with a Structural Blueprint from Structural Strategy.