Topic Support

I was actually looking at this myself when I first started using the plugin. If you use the departments menu on the admin panel of osticket, you can basically set “categories”. I didn’t really like it at first, but it actually grew on me because you can control who gets to see certain help desk categories doing it that way they designed this plugin when you setup users, teams, and groups. The only functionality you lose from the “Help Topics” is the use of detailed addon topic forms which isn’t a function with this plugin anyway.

awesome! Thanks for the work-around. That was kind-of my plan but wanted to make sure I wasn’t missing something.

Thanks, JCarbohn.

Heya,

JCarbohn is right ??

We basically approached this plugin from a Support perspective.
it’s actually the main reason we disregarded topics at the start –> we noticed half of the people don’t even select the department right, let alone a topic.

We base alot on the departments, including the email, notifications, etc.

We also left this at the osTicket side as we stick to being a “bridge” meaning everything in osticket should (eventually) work in WP. (and visa versa).

However i am very open to any suggestions you would like to see things to become.
In the end we published the plugin to fill a “lack” of good ticket systems in WP (atleast nothing that suited our needs).
i’m aiming to suite other peoples needs with it haha ??

Regards,
Marco

I’m new to OSTicket so bear with me but the thing I really like about topics is they allow you to assign a custom support form that I can set to be required to fill out. For example, we use software that people have a plethora of issues for.

While I can set up a department called “(software’s name)” I still have to read what is likely to be either a long message detailing everything that’s wrong or a short non-descriptive message that requires me to immediately follow up. Instead I could have a form that says

Forgot password?: yes/no
Role change?: yes/no
duplicate file?: yes/no
etc

They also have sub-topics so a topic could be Printers and subtopics could be Cannot Print/Scan, Printer Maintenance, Printer Supply Request.

Just a thought. I can certainly make due with just creating separate departments

Ntrabue,

This plugin is still very young and being developed by a good team at Key4ce. After seeing many replies by Marco, he welcomes hearing requests from the plugin users to implement other features in the future.

I do agree with you though, it would be nice to have a way to expand on helpdesk requests so it narrows the issues down. I’m sure this is something that the plugin team has thought about already.

Stick with the plugin right now by creating the departments. I’m not sure how big your helpdesk team is, but you can do a lot of user management so people are assigned to specific helpdesk requests.

Alright.

i will check if we can implement the topics part not upcoming version, but version after that.

(upcoming version is really a handful to let the admin create tickets properly with a ajax user search in multiple DB’s).

and yes, i / we aim for a plugin that suites all peoples needs (not just our own haha), so we are happy to listen to requests, what people need or miss for sure.

Regards,
Marco

Totally understand JCarbohn. I’m happy to stick with the plugin I see no better alternative and this plugin is very well done and obviously the support is fantastic.

Thank you, Marco! I appreciate the plugin and all of your work. Please let me know if you need beta testers for updates or anything we have a staging site for our live site so I’d be happy to play around with stuff on our staging site if it helps.

hmm,

Well from how it looks like: we definitly need to setup some kind of alpha, beta, rc, stable method with some more people to test.

Just actually found a bug on my own site, but seems it depends on the situation to where it pops up (which is why i didn’t spot it before, if there where other testers i am sure it would been spotted haha).

i just have to setup some kind of good framework where people can pull beta code, test, report issues etc without disturbing the stable release forum.

so i will get back to you on that1 ??

Regards,
Marco

I’d be happy to help as well, Marco.