wpsc Support Tickets

Download

wpsc Support Tickets is a plugin for WordPress that allows you to offer support tickets to your website visitors & customers. It is lightweight, open source, Ajax enabled, and easy to use and administrate.

Features

• Users can create support tickets and reply to their own tickets
• Admins, and any user granted the manage_wpsc_support_tickets capability, can reply to, close, or delete any ticket
• Front end support ticket interface is done in jQuery, and utilizes Ajax ticket loading
• Customizable departments, email messages, and CSS for custom solutions
• You can hide support ticket capabilities from a user who has not purchased a specific product (requires wpStoreCart 2.4.9 or higher)
• Admin dashboard widget shows all open tickets
• Both the admin and frontend provides a WYSIWYG HTML editor for formatting
• i18n ready and compatible
• 100% free and open source under the LGPL
• Languages: English, Swedish (Svenska), Norwegian (Norsk), French (le Français), German (Deutsch)

Installation

To install wpsc Support Tickets, go into the WordPress admin panel, and click on Add New under the Plugins menu. Search for wpsc Support Tickets, and then click on Install, then click Install Now. Once the installation completes, Activate the plugin.

Next, follow these steps:

• Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress
• Create a new page, call it something like Tickets.
• Inside this page, place this shortcode only: [wpscSupportTickets]
• Visit the wpsc Support Tickets page and select a “mainpage” for wpsc Support Tickets to use, like the Ticket page we just told you to create

Settings

The main setting you need to be concerned with is Main Page. This should be set to the WordPress page where you pasted this shortcode: [wpscSupportTickets]

If you fail to set a Main Page, then you will get blank white pages when a ticket is submitted, and wpsc Support Tickets will fail to run properly.

There are additional options which can be edited. Simply click on the More Options button to reveal them.

Departments

By default, wpsc Support Tickets comes with two departments: Support and Billing. Inside this setting, that looks like this:
Support||Billing

that’s because we use two pipe symbols to separate our values. Let’s say we wanted to add two more departments, one called Q&A, and the other Beta Testers. To that, we would change our setting to this:
Support||Billing||Q&A||Beta Testers

But wait, let’s suppose we want to get rid of billing. This is what that would look like:
Support||Q&A||Beta Testers

Email

This is the admin email where you would like to receive notifications of new tickets and new replies to tickets.

New Ticket Email

This is the email subject and email body that is sent to users who open a new ticket.

New Reply Email

This is the email subject and email body that is sent when a reply happens on one of their tickets.

Dashboard Widget

wpsc Support Tickets comes with an admin dashboard widget so that you can stay up to date.

The Frontend

^ That’s what it looks like with the 2010 WordPress theme. Note that very little CSS is used, and almost everything is within tables (I know, I know, but it makes sense for support tickets and forms, plus it looks good by default on most themes.) Below, is the new new ticket form, also in 2010:

CSS Classes & IDs

The following classes and IDs are rendered on the front end. You can use CSS to stylize how wpsc Support Tickets are displayed.

IDs:
#wpscst_top_page – Is really there just as an anchor for the top of the support tickets.
#wpscst-new – The button to create a new ticket
#wpscst_nic_panel – The panel for the new ticket editor
#wpscst_initial_message – The textarea for the new ticket editor (is replaced using Javascript nicEdit)
#wpscst_department – The department drop for the new ticket interface
#wpscst_edit_ticket – The DIV that is used to load old tickets for viewing/replying
#wpscst_meta – On an old ticket, this displays the author and timestamp
#wpscst_results_posted_by – On an old ticket, this is the ticket author
#wpscst_results_initial_message – On an old ticket, this is the first message that started the ticket
#wpscst_submit – The frontend submit ticket button
#wpscst-cancel – The frontend cancel button

CLASSES:
.wpscst-button – All buttons
.wpscst-table –
.wpscst_results_posted_by – This is where the author is displayed on replies
.wpscst_results_message – This is the the author message
.wpscst_staff_reply_table – The is the table that holds a staff reply. If you style this different then the rest of the replies, you can make staff replies stick out.
.wpscst_staff_reply_thead – Same as above, except governs the thead tag.
.wpscst_staff_reply_tbody – Same, but the tbody tag.

Translations

wpsc Support Tickets is i18n ready and compatible. Currently we provide English, Swedish, Norwegian, & French versions (thanks to users who have created and provided the translations.) If you speak another language, and would like to make a new translation, please consider releasing it to the community (leave a comment below or contact us.)

To make a new translation, you should be familiar with the i18n system. In the languages folder, you will find wpsc-support-tickets.pot file, which you can use to create your .po and .mo files.

Use Poedit, or the editor of your choice to create your translation. Save your new translation as .po and .mo files.

Place the created .po and .mo files in the /wpsc-support-tickets/languages/ folder, using this naming convention:
wpsc-support-tickets-xx_XX.po where xx_XX represent your language code. For example, for a Swedish translation, the file name is wpsc-support-tickets-sv_SE.po

For optimal translation depth, we recommend setting your language in wp-config.php before installing and activating wpsc Support Tickets. Otherwise default options, such as the email subject and email text, will use English, since it was written into the database during activation.

Translation Credits

• Norwegian (Norsk) by Rune Kristoffersen ( [email protected] ) http://www.sports-markedet.no
• French (le Français) by Hawaien88 -> Merci à Hawaien88 pour la traduction Française.
• Swedish (Svenska) by Stefan Johansson
• Brazilian Portuguese (português brasileiro) translation provided by Thiago Bernardi, e-mail address: [email protected]
• German (Deutsch) translation provided by Markus Scheffknecht, contact at https://twitter.com/Scheffhauser
• Finnish (Suomi) by Mikko Ohtonen http://twitter.com/mopetti
• Dutch (Nederlands) by Jos Wolbers http://www.wolbersonline.nl