Hi
Congratulations on the plugin. Having spent nearly a week playing with some really rubbish WordPress ticket systems, this one actually looks like it can almost do what we need, which is great.
Having played, here’s a few suggestions:
1) The plugin replaces the Woocommerce Products menu when activated. Some sort of conflict.
2) Make the layout responsive rather than fixed width as it doesn’t play nicely with themes that don’t have 950px wide pages.
3) Huge wish this one – find some way to integrate with email, so that should a customer reply to a notification email, that reply is added to the support ticket thread.
I know the last one is a big ask, but it’s awesome as support systems should be as easy to use as email for UX!
Your feedback is extremely appreciated, thank you.
I’m guessing the Woocommerce plugin must be using the same menu placement ID as my plugin. I’ll change mine in the next update.
This plugin is written based off a stand-alone PHP ticket system I’d written 8 years ago, which did have the ability to accept replies sent via email. All it needs is a dedicated email inbox that it can pull from. Funny thing is, no one really seemed particularly excited by it back then, so I left it out of this plugin version. You’ve inspired me to include it.
As for a responsive layout, that’s definitely something I’ll work on for the next update. The layout is actually copied straight out the old PHP ticket system I mentioned, so admittedly it needs a little polishing.
Thanks again for the feedback!
Now that’s service!
I’ve hacked the template in the PHP to use a class system and sort of made it responsive. It’s not very pretty code, but it sort of works. I ended up using the @media commands to hide fields (such as date) as the width reduced, but I’m sure a little tweaking from someone much better than me would find it relatively easy!
I was actually going to get our dev to help implement the email reply system, so if it’s possible for it to be part of the actual plugin that would be amazingly cool. It’s not something people think of, but for people these days they get the email on their phone and just want to hit reply, not go through a web system login, etc.
Anyway, we’re just working on releasing a woocommerce store so we’ve tried 5 different ticket system plugins including the supposed “best” paid one, which is hopeless. Yours, already, is the one we’re going to implement, so if you do continue to develop it, I wish you every success.
I actually held off reviewing it because I want to give it 5 stars and currently it’s 4! Which felt mean.
I’d imagine you’ve taken it from really ugly code to not very pretty code, so that’s a step up. 😉
I’d looked at a lot of the other ticket system plugins and was left with a similar impression of them. I think a lot of them try and pack a bit too much into them and result in a chaotic and confusing interface. Which, in my opinion, is no good for a customer point of contact. My aim is to provide something simple and clean, without losing any of the important features.
I’ll most definitely be continuing the development of the plugin. I quickly tossed it out there to see what sort of interest there was for it. Wasn’t expecting it to grab 130 d/l’s in two weeks. Honestly a 4 star review would still be a nice thing. Better than its current 0. 😉 But I do want that 5, so I’ll get your ideas implemented asap.
FYI, I changed the menu placement ID from 28 to 5.1, which puts it directly under Dashboard.
Might be too high for some people, but I felt that having Support tickets directly under Dashboard would be useful for admins/customer service.
Odd that WP doesn’t handle menu ID conflicts, but as far as I can tell you avoid this by using the decimal, so hence 5.1 rather than just 5.
Anyway, fixed it for now.
After you mentioned that happening, I took a look and saw they mentioned to use decimals to avoid conflicts. I’d assumed that they would simply push one down if it had a duplicate id as opposed to simply wiping one out. Live and learn.
I’ve added the decimal in the revision I’m working on.
Glad you caught that. Thanks again!
“5.1” in quotes worked for me.
OK, so here’s a completely bespoke idea, but it might be quite a good USP for the plugin. We’re running Woocommerce and we’re using this for the customer support.
Woocommerce is really extensible.
It would be very cool if you could:
a) Associate a ticket with an order/customer
b) Let the customer see their tickets and ticket history in their account page.
Just a thought because of the way we’re using it. Pretty sure the same could be done with other ecommerce solutions.
I’ll have to look into the Woocommerce thing. I’m not familiar with it.
Is that a free plugin?
Meanwhile I’m almost done with a more responsive re-write…both on the front end and admin end.
I saw the update, going to apply it tonight. Woocommerce itself is free, yes. In the main plugin repository.
If you haven’t already updated, you might want to hold off if you’ve made any changes to any of the templates. Or at least, back them up before updating. I’m going to move the templates into the database so that they don’t get overwritten every time there is an update.
Yes, we have kept with the original while you’re making your updates until you’re happy.
We noticed one bug which we fixed: there’s an ajax handler for unprivileged users, bit not one for privileged user (submit and login to see), so logged in users (customers in our case) got a “0” error.
Although it doesn’t stop the system working, if you log php errors there are a few there too if it helps.
We launched last night though and the ticket system is installed and working at http://www.funkystockings.com if you want to see it in action. (Our Hosiery ecommerce site)
Just FYI, I won’t ever be happy with it. 😉
I’ll add a hook for the privileged user…hadn’t even considered that someone would be logged in when submitting a ticket. Makes sense on an ecommerce site though!
Great looking site! Is that the Woocommerce plugin? Great to see the ticket system plugin in an actual site. Please do let me know after using it for awhile what can be done to make it better.
LOL. Yes, Woocommerce – hence why I was saying it would be nice if we could somehow have a shortcode or something to show the logged in user’s tickets on their account.
Glad you like the look of the site. It shows how well it can all work together with some thought and careful use of extensions. We’ll see if the customers agree!
I’ll dig into the Woocommerce code and see if there is any sort of hook available that I could tie into to show a users ticket list. Assuming the users log in with an email address it should be fairly easy to tie the two together.
