juin
09
WATS going on…
If you speak french, you may prefer to read the french version of this note.
What is WATS? WATS is a wordpress plugin I have just written with my small fingers. WATS stands for « Wordpress Advanced Ticket System ». It allows transformation of Wordpress into a CRM system thanks to the addition of a ticket submission module into the administration panelas well as associated pages creation on the frontend.
As of today, there is no plugin like this one for Wordpress. There has been an attempt for Wordpress mu but it has never been propagated into the single blog version. WATS is therefore an original plugin.
In Release 1.0, WATS is absolutely free. The only requirement is to keep the backlink automatically added by WATS in the footer of your site. This is a mean to promote this plugin and recognize my work. If you disagree with this, just don’t install the plugin.
Ticket system features (release 1.0) :
1/ Statistics :
In the Wordpress admin panel, WATS adds a dashboard widget containing few stats about the number of tickets.
2/ Options :
In the Wordpress admin panel, WATS adds a page for the options where the admin can set the ticket numbering, define a guest user who will be allowed to submit ticket, add, modify or delete statuses, priorities and types of tickets and define the categories where tickets can be submitted.
3/ Ticket creation and edition :
In the admin panel, WATS adds a menuitem for the edition and the submission of tickets. These are quite similar to the post ones. Only registered users who can edit posts and the guest user can submit new tickets. Only registered users who can edit posts can edit tickets.
Guest user is an account dedicated to the ticket creation. Thanks to this, you don’ t need to ask every visitor to register to be able to submit tickets. They can just use the guest user account. The guest user account must have a minimum level of contributor.
As of release 1.0.43, you can also submit tickets through the frontend thanks to the frontend submission form feature. To do this, just create a post or a page with the following tag : [WATS_TICKET_SUBMIT_FORM]. This will create the submission form automatically on this page. The form works with Ajax so it won’t reload once the ticket is submitted. You have several options to set the form access, ticket publication status and default author for tickets.
As of release 1.0.44, users can now directly submit tickets through email! This feature allows them to submit a ticket without connecting to the site. The ticket is directly inserted into the database pending validation.
4/ Tickets display :
In the frontend, WATS uses custom templates to display the ticket. If you haven’t created a custom template in your theme, WATS uses default ones.
In order to customize your theme for WATS, you can copy and edit singe-ticket.php and comments-ticket.php from the theme subdirectory (within the plugin directory) to your theme directory.
Ticket display is just like the single post display with few modifications (number, priority, status and type).
5/ Ticket update and follow-up :
Ticket follow-up is performed within the frontend by just adding comments and updating the custom fields : status, priority and type of ticket.
6/ Tickets listing table (available starting 1.0.4) :
It is possible to automatically include within a post a table containing tickets listing for all categories or post category associated to the created post. To achieve this, just include one of those two tags within a post :
- [WATS_TICKET_LIST 0] : table containing all tickets for all categories
- [WATS_TICKET_LIST 1] : table containing all tickets for the post category
Starting release 1.0.16, there is an ajax filter available. It allows the user to filter the table content dynamically based on the tickets priorities, statuses, types and owners.
7/ Tickets visibility filtering (available starting 1.0.12) :
Available starting 1.0.12, there is an admin pannel option that will allow you to specify who can browse and updates the tickets : everybody, only registered users or only ticket creator and administrators. This strongly enhances security and confidentiality around exchanges with users through tickets.
For instrance, by selecting the value « only the ticket creator and admins », on the frontend, you will have to connect to be able to browse tickets. If you are an admin, you could see and update all the tickets. If you are the ticket creator, you could see and update this ticket (and more generally all the tickets you have created). But if you are just a visitor or another registered user than the ticket creator, you won’t be able to see and update this ticket.
This filter also impacts the tickets listing table.
Download WATS
You can download WATS here.
Install WATS
WATS installation is plug and play! You just need to activate the plugin and then get to the options panel where you can associate the guest user (if you have created one) and the categories where you want to allow ticket submission. WATS has a moderate impact on the database. It doesn’t create any new table. It just adds one entry into the options table and 4 entries into the metas table per ticket.
WATS works fine with Wordpress 2.8. It uses Ajax and Javascript under the admin panel so be sure to turn JS support on under your browser settings.
WATS Localization (release 1.0) :
WATS is available in english and french. If you would like to contribute and translate it into other langages, don’t hesitate to send me the translated PO, they will be integrated. Please use the french PO file as a basis as it would always be the most up to date translation.
German added in Release 1.0.23 (thanks to Tobias Kalleder).
Spanish added in Release 1.0.49 (thanks to Esteban).
Lithuanian added in Release 1.0.50 (thanks for Arturas).
Bug and support :
Please leave a comment on this note or drop me a mail through the contact form.
Changelog :
This page includes the changelog.
Donation :
You appreciate WATS? That’s great! While WATS is free, I already spent hundreds of hours developping it, supporting it and adding new features following user requests. Why don’t you acknowledge my work on WATS by making a donation? This is a way to say « thank you » and motivate me to deliver new features and support.
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Error with install i get this in All Category
Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in C:\xampp\htdocs\wordpress\wp-content\plugins\wats\wats-template.php on line 192
I think I know why… Have you been first to the options page first to add at least one category to which you can submit a post?
If you don’t add at least one, then you could get this error. I will add some robustness into the code on that front to prevent this error.
i noticed a bug, when you activate the theme your pages (about,etc) get indexed on your main index, which shoudlnt happen. once you deactivate it they no longer show on your blog index.
Hi Chris,
Thanks for your feedback. I am not sure I fully understand what’s going on. Can you provide me with the url and describe the bug more precisely?
Thanks a lot!
Olivier
i unchecked include tickets on home page with posts, and it fixed it.
Ok great! This was a feature requested and implemented between 1.0 and 1.0.1, I am glad that it helped you.
1) Unable to associate a contributor user.
2) Fatal error: Call to undefined function esc_attr() in \plugins\wats\wats-edit-form-advanced.php on line 31
3) I would want people to have to create a user in order to supply a ticket. (they all have accounts anyways)
4) A templet page to add a ticket and show tickets would be nice.
1&2 : From what I saw on your site, you are running 2.7.1. You must be running 2.8 in order for the plugin to work fine. It isn’t supported on 2.7.1.
3 : That’s natural. Right now, you cannot create tickets without being registered so I think that’s what you are looking for.
4 : What do you mean? There is a page to submit tickets, you should have seen these in the admin panel. There is also a page to display ticket. You can edit this one by copying the template php files from the plugin theme directory to your own theme directory and then customize these according to your needs.
I have been waiting for this a long time and have started development on my own ticketing system. Now I can move on to more essential things.
So you make sure you keep up the good work! If you need any help or donations contact me. or put up a donation button.
@Xmoov : thanks a lot for your kind words, they are much appreciated! I may put a donation button later
found its using a lot of server load, when i try and login its trying to load wats-ticket-new but just times out and wont let me login
You are right, with the guest account, you will directly be redirected to wats-ticket-new in order to enter a new ticket, no other option for the guest account. Now I am a bit surprise by your statment about the server load as this page doesn’t load a lot more data than the new post page…
Are you running php 5?
Hi Olivier,
Thanks for the great plugin.
Maybe my question is stupid…, but I hadn’t find where/how can I see the form for the ticket submission.
I added one of my categories in the settings, but i can’t see anything in that category or inside the posts.
What I’m doing wrong?
Best regards
mmmh, I’m working with 2.7.1 version of wordpress isn’t supported for this version???
I can’t upgrade to 2.8 version of Wordpress…
Any Idea?
The form to submit tickets is under the admin panel. You can access it through the menu added by the plugin.
The plugin doesn’t work fine under 2.7.1. You will get some errors. It is so tightly linked to the core that I had to make a choice between 2.7.1 and 2.8. As I didn’t want to maintain a lot of specificities for the first version, I decided to drop 2.7.1 support.
aha…, ok Olivier maybe I will find another plugin for this. I’ll be find with a simple solution. Maybe you should think to build the plugin in a more flexible way…, in order to maximize your efforts.
Thanks anyway for contribute with your work.
Why don’t you migrate to 2.8? It is a great release with improved performances.
in order to maximize you efforts?
Well
The issue is that WATS reuses some part of wordpress core templates for the ticket submission. 2.8 introduces several functions. In order to add 2.7.1 support, I would have to copy those functions into the plugin or to test if those functions exist before calling these, this would add a lot of complexity to the plugin and therefore increase maintenance… At this point, I prefer to concentrate on new features, I think it is more benefitial for users, isn’t it
Hi!,
When you are using more than 5 plugins, and mantain several blogs that are working perfectly, you don’t want to get in troubles upgrading to a very recent version of Wordpress… and who can tell to you that if you don’t work with compatibility in mind, your plugin will be compatible with the next version of wordpress…
I think Cforms doesn’t have this feature, so your idea is very good (I didn’t see any plugin like your yet), but for me this feature is not very high in my agenda.
I know I’m a little « bastard » with my my critics but just take it in a positive way.
You know I’m right
Dont’ take me serious, we use to have great stuff for free on the net.
Maybe that’s the problem
Saludos desde Madrid
Of course your right, I just couldn’t resist.
Well, you need to understand that Wats isn’t a plugin like others. By saying that, I don’t want to say that it is the best one, certainly not, I just want to highlight the fact that it goes very deep with Wordpress core by reusing some of the pages with few tweaks.
I will see later what can be done as you are not the first one asking for 2.7.1 compatibility. Most of the plugins have been upgraded for 2.8 compatibility so the upgrade shouldn’t cause a lot of problems to you
I’m tweaking wordpress in order to be an advanced CMS and currently needs a few delicated hacks with several plugins, so for me it’s a delicated situation to go to 2.8 and I have more things to do…
Just have a look to the code maybe it’s not so difficult to make it 2.7 compatible, anyway at the first time that I upgrade to 2.8 I’ll check it out your plugin for sure.
Best regards
Ok so I took a look further into the code to try to make it work for 2.7.1…
I had to import few 2.8 functions that aren’t available in 2.7.1. Still I am getting few warnings on the backend as some functions prototypes have evolved between both releases.
For the frontend, I will have to tweak back the query, it will not be really fun
Not sure that I will be able to make it and also to make it clean because I don’t want to make the plugin so heavy to maintain because of these modifications.
Will keep you posted.
as soon as i set the guest account it times out, its set as subscriber, tries to load the ticket new, then i have to rename the plugin directory so i can deactivate it and login again.
this is a fresh 2.8 install with no plugins but WATS
The guest account needs to have « contributor » level at least. With subscriber, you don’t have the minimum level required…
Based on the number of requests I had to make the plugin compatible with earlier releases of WP, I have added it. It wasn’t really easy as I had to bring few WP 2.8 functions within the plugin in order to allow it to be support on earlier releases. I also had to tweak the query differently from 2.8, not easy but did it
As of 1.0.5, 2.7.1 is supported as well. It will be available for download from the wordpress svn tonight. If you face any bug, please report these.
i set an account up name support and set it as contributor, but still times out while trying to login
Have you installed the latest release issued today? Do you run php 5 on your blog? Are there any other plugin running beside Wats?
Great Olivier!,
Now I’m enjoying some holiday days, but as soon as I can I’ll give you my feedback.
Best regards,
Great thanks, I am looking forward to hear from you.
Enjoy your holidays!
I have problem with creating ticket – my Guest user is set to admin and I try to insert new Ticket (« You are not allowed… »). It would be also very helpfull not to require registration and use template form for my users (and not Wordpress administration) to insert new tickets.
What is the level of your guest user? It should be at least contributor.
The insert ticket form is on the admin side for security purposes as you are inserting new tickets (which are posts from a DB point of view) so it is better to require the user to login so that robots don’t come and spam your database with bunch of fake tickets. The guest user is there to avoid the registration, this is a user to be shared between visitors so that they don’t have to register to submit new tickets.
I have user test (Contributor). But I am not allowed…
When I try to login as admin and publish ticket, I am also not allowed…
I understand your reasons for login, thank you for your answer…
Can you please contact me through my contact form and send me the guest user login details to your site?
A very nice Wp-Plugin – thanks for shareing …
Great plugin. I’m having a problem. When a non-administrator logs in, they get encounter a redirect loop. If you send me an email I can send you the site login details to demonstrate.
This is a known issue which was fixed in 1.0.6. I encourage you to upgrade to 1.0.8 which was released two days ago, this should clear the issue
If not, please let me know. You can send me a mail via the contact form.
Screenshots please!
oh yes, please I am really curios what it looks like. Screenshots please.
I have updated this post with some screenshots, hope it will raise interest
I have installed the plugin and set the options. I have a basic question.
So can an unregistered user submit a support ticket from my blog?
How do I include the support ticket form on my blog page?
Yes, an unregistered user can submit a support ticket from your blog. Basically, just create a guest user account, identify it as the guest user in the options and then provide in your frontend.
The support ticket form is part of the backend. This is for security purposes. Only logged in users can submit tickets. But you just need to set a guest account and provide it to your visitors so that they can use it. With this, no robots will be able to spam you with fake tickets.
Using your fabulous plugin at http://postfixmail.com/blog in the questions category. Everything works except when a ticket is clicked on (showing its details)the sidebar navigation/widgets disappears. I love your plugin but want to display the navigation for users when they are viewing tickets.
This is absolutely true! I missed it while developping the plugin because I used the default kubrick template which doesn’t include the sidebar on single post.
So I have modified the single ticket template in 1.0.13 to include the sidebar. It is now available for download
Wow! That’s awesome! I wrote you a killer review http://wordpress.org/support/topic/303973?replies=1. Let me know if I can do anything else for you as this is support I wish every plugin had!
Andrew,
Thanks a lot for your kind words and the killer review!
I don’t commit on « 10 minutes support » however if I am available and I can fix it easily, I always try to do it quickly. Luckily, this was the case for your request as I was at home next to my SVN so I could directly update the WP repository after I have fixed the plugin. As you can imagine, it sometimes takes more than 10 minutes to find a solution and post it but I always do my best in order to maximize user’s experience of my plugin…
If you want to make a donation, don’t hesitate but your kind words already represent a great donation on my mind
Is it normal for the plugin to be making a bunch of custom fields in static pages that has nothing to do with the Plugin with WATS_TICKET_NUMBER, WATS_TICKET_STATUS, WATS_TICKET_PRIORITY and WATS_TICKET_TYPE? and values like 9 and 10s
Or is this conflicting another plugin? I tried del them but then it just re-appears after I update. It only seems to affect the pages I create after I installed WATS and not the pages I created before
I had the same problem but, like you, didn’t know if it was really a problem. I got great support from the author, lets see if her comes through
Eric, Andrew,
I acknowledge the issue. I checked it first time this morning. I am trying to understand the root cause now. Hope I will be in a position to provide an explanation and a fix soon. I will keep you posted.
Good news! I have identified the problem and found a solution for it. There was a problem with a hook being called while it shouldn’t. I have moved it to another location where it would be hit only when it is supposed to…
1.0.14 contains the fix and is on its way to the repository
If you have any problem, just let me know.
Excellent fix! Thanks for fixing it and releasing the updated download so fast!
You are welcome!
Thank you Oliver for the fix…
I have a few suggestion for this plugin…
1) Instead of having all user in general being able to view or edit a ticket… could you make it so only certain wp roles can do it… I am using the capabilities plugin and I have custom roles created with it certain capabilities, I only want certain wp roles to be able to view and certain wp roles to be able to edit the tickets and certain ones to be able to create. I was wondering if that come be implemented, it would make the plugin so much more flexiable.
2) Would it be possible to be able to add custom dropdown menus to the ticket. Like if we want to have a drop down menu or input menu for « Assigned to: » or w/e else we want for a drop down or input box when we create and edit the ticket.
Anyways that great work!
Eric,
Here are the answers :
1/ Not sure if you have seen this option but as of release 1.0.12, you have some flexibility with regards to ticket browsing/update. You can set it to anybody, only registered users or only ticket originator and admins. Isn’t it enough granularity?
2/ I am not sure of the requirement there. Are you looking for a way to yank/assign the ticket to users? Through the admin only or frontend as well? Only at the ticket creation or through the entire life of the ticket?
Thank you for the nice plugin, it is really useful for us!
The only problem – how can we filter tickets by Type/Status/Priority? We badly need filtering by status. Is it possible to add such a feature to plugin? Unfortunately I don’t know php and cannot do it myself
Are you looking for filtering or sorting? Filtering is about showing only entries having a designed value. Sorting is juste about sorting by values. Are you looking for this in the admin side or the frontend on the ticket list?
Oliver
1) I saw those options, and they are very useful. However I am talking about letting a certain role be able to view, create or edit. What I am trying to do is allow role1 to create and view only. Role2 to edit, create and view. But I don’t want role2 to be an administrator.
Current I am running Capabilites by Jordi and it allows me to create custom roles, set capabilities to roles and add capabilites. Does your plugin use their own seperate capabilites to achieve the create, view and edit or does it use the WP create/edit/view page capabilites? Cause If you use your own capabilities I could just add it with that plugin and I think I could achieve what I am wanting to do
2) No I am talking about someone just going in and selecting their name in the dropdown menu so that people can see who is working on the problem. For example: You have dropdown menus for priority, status and type, But I want to add another dropdown menu (or more with custom options) to that list such as « Assigned to: »
Eric,
1/ I am currently using the edit_post capability for ticket creation/edition. This is the most flexible. For your needs, I would suggest to set role 1 as a contributor and role 2 as an editor. I guess this meets your requirements.
2/ Ok I think I see what you are looking for. I’d like to get your input on this :
- who could assign tickets to individuals : anybody, registered users only, admins only?
- when can you assign a ticket : only at ticket creation or anytime?
- where can you assign a ticket : in the admin side on the creation/edit page or in the frontend (along with ticket update form)?
I will give that a try, I will play around with the roles to see if I can achieve this.
As for the assign to option.
- I was thinking that only an admin and moderator WProle that fixes problems can assign individuals
- I was thinking when you create a ticket it would show – or N/A and then when someone goes to look at it and edit it they can change it to assign to a person name
- Both the backend and the comment area but NOT during creation. We don’t want members assigning problems to ppl
Is it possible to make it so that we can create our own custom dropdown fields and txt boxes fields, so incase we have more fields we want add later we don’t have to go through code. it can be easily inputed in the backend in admin options or something?
Ok for the assign, I think I got it, I will work on it when I have some time…
For the last request, everything is feasible but not always easy to achieve… I think the easiest would be to bring customer fields meta box in on the ticket creation window. It would allow you to add text inputs.
Hi Eric,
You are lucky, I woke up motivated this morning
So I have coded the assignment feature in 3 hours. Release 1.0.15 is available for download now.
Hope it meets your requirements.
Olivier> Are you looking for filtering or sorting? Filtering is about showing only entries having a designed value. Sorting is juste about sorting by values. Are you looking for this in the admin side or the frontend on the ticket list?
I talk about filtering in the ticket list. So, for example I will be able to see all Open tickets with High priority which belong to category Sales and only them. You already have a filter by category so if you add 3 filters by Type/Status/Priority it would be very nice. All these 4 filters should be combined by AND, I think it is enough in more than 99 % cases. I’m sure it is very necessary feature.
Thank you in advance.
@Max : Ok, I will take a look at this. It shouldn’t be that complex to achieve with raw post form. In Ajax, this is another story
1) Thank you oliver… I was wondering if the assign to could be a text box, so that I can just type something in there and then it will show up as what I type. Because if I have a community of 300+ members I don’t want a list of 300 ppl to look for.
2) can u please explain that customer field meta box thing to me, I am kinda lost with that.
1/ Everything is possible
Now it requires additionnal work on my side… The issue with the text box is that you could enter what you want into that so it needs some error check to ensure that the entered login is a valid login. Also users will have to know login from each other. Let me think about it further.
2/ There was a typo, it is custom fields, not customer fields. This is a meta box that is present in the post/page pages and that allows you to add meta data to your post.
@Max : Ok I did it! It took me around 6 hours and I had very hard times with Ajax on the frontend and mysql left join but sounds like it is ok know
1.0.16 is on its way to the repository!
Hope you will enjoy it.
Hi Olivier!
Thank you for your fast responce! I installed the version 1.0.16.
I see that you made a lot of changes in code. The only problem – I cannot see how I can filter
Unfortunately I cannot give you acess to my wordpress installation (it is private), but I guess I’m doing something wrong. When I tell about filter in the ticket list I mean page:
localhost/wp-admin/admin.php?page=wats/wats-edit.php
when I open it I see no changes since previous version. Proibably you implemented this filter on another page? Or may be I have to change some of my settings or install an additional plug-in?
You didn’t specify that you wanted the filter in the admin… So by default, I implemented the filter in the frontend on the ticket list (the one you add to a post). Please check out there.
Hi Olivier!
Yes, it was my fault that I did not specify where I need.
You wrote: « I implemented the filter in the frontend on the ticket list ». Do you mean localhost/wp-admin/admin.php?page=wats/wats-ticket-new.php ?
I don’t see any possibility to filter there. I only see that there is a possibility to setup type, priority, status, owner for new ticket.
Can you tell me which URL should I open? May be also a screenshot where I can see what should I see.
Thank you!
In fact, I misinterpreted your statment : « You already have a filter by category so if you add 3 filters by Type/Status/Priority it would be very nice ».
If you refer, to the ticket listing feature, there is already a filter by category so I thought you were talking about this one…
To see the ticket list I am talking about and play with the filter, you need to create a post and put into it the relevant syntax as per point 6 (see the original not at the top and check out point 6). This should clarify.
Hi Oliver!
Thank you very much! I missed this point. Now I added such a post with [WATS_TICKET_LIST 0] and happy
Just for a case if you have time – you may add the same filter functionality also on admin page – for most users it will be clear to find it there.
Sorry again that I did not find it at first and thanks for your great work!
Hi Max,
No trouble, you are welcome
Adding these to the admin isn’t that simple to perform as you need to hook on the core. I may implement this later…
I get this error after setting up WATS and changing the ‘guest user’ to GUEST.
This webpage has a redirect loop.
The webpage at localhost/helpdesk/wp-admin/admin.php?page=wats/wats-ticket-new.php has resulted in too many redirects. Clearing your cookies for this site may fix the problem. If not, it is possibly a server configuration issue and not a problem with your computer.
This error makes DASHBOARD unable to load.
WATS requires security rights set to EDITOR in order to work properly, not CONTRIBUTOR as the documentation states.
With the EDITOR setting, the ‘guest’ user has the security rights to change the WATS settings.
Fred,
You aren’t the first one to report this issue but I have never been able to reproduce it on my test site unfortunately. WATS is working perfectly for me with a contributor level guest user.
I am really sorry for this issue. I would be happy to work on it and fix it if you are willing to help me reproduce it. Please contact me through my contact form, it will be easier.
I setup a guest user with contributor privs. That user cannot login. Login just sits there and does nothing, then times out. When i try and login its trying to load wats-ticket-new but just times out and wont let the guest user login.
I also cannot find where a user submits a ticket. Help?
Tony,
I guess you are facing the redirection loop issue faced by few users which I haven’t been able to reproduce on my test site.
I would really appreciate if you could contact through the contact form providing me with your site details so that I can debug the issue.
Did you get my message? I sent it on the contact form
Yes, got it, I have dropped you a mail.
How do I change the default language to English?
The default language is English. If the plugin is working in French for you, this is because you have set your blog default language as French in the wp-config.php file. Just remove this setting or set it as English and the plugin will work in English.
I have emailed you back just now.
The redirection issue is now fixed thanks to Tony’s help with his site!
Just use 1.0.17 and no more problem!
hi Olive,
I have just installed WATS on the latest WP but I found unsolved problem with the integration.
I made a new post and the « comment » already checked (active), but when I check the result (preview) in the frontend, I can not see the status, type, and category dropdown at the page
If you want to create a ticket, then use the ticket creation menuitem, not the post one…
The status, type and priority drop down show up on individual ticket page together with the comment form.
Can it work in Wordpress MU 2.8.4?
I can’t run it.
another question is…
If I change the words of option in Chinese, it couldn’t work either.
Is there any solution?
You really did a great job! Keep going!!
I just tested the new WATS with the admin notification and it works GREAT!!! Thank you very much!
@Echo :
I don’t think it will work with MU but I am not sure… In fact, I haven’t tried as I don’t have any MU test site so I can’t commit on this…
For the Chinese, I don’t know either. I am not sure of how it works. There is a separate enconding I guess. The issue is that since it goes through Ajax, it may cause some problems.
The easiest would be to modify the options directly in the DB in your case I think.
@Tony :
Thanks! You are welcome! Don’t hesitate to rate the plugin on the wordpress extend repository if you like it
Works great, thank you
I am building a website in which the users do not get to see the admin panel. So effectively they can not access the form to submit questions. Can we place the form in a category page by inserting some code?
You need to user the guest account feature. Create a guest user account with a minimum level of contributor and then go to the wats options and set it as the guest user. With that account, they will only be able to submit new tickets.
Hi Oliver!
Thank you again for this great plug-in. One more wish – could you make sorting by columns on pages which contains [WATS_TICKET_LIST 0] and [WATS_TICKET_LIST 1]? If it is hard to implement – is it possible at least to change sorting to descending by creation date – to show the newest tickets first?
Thank you in advance.
Hi Max,
Good news, I have added the sorting for all columns within the ticket listing table. I will post the new release tonight, stay tuned!
This has to be the best supported plugin on the planet. Thanks Oliver
Thanks Tony for your kind words!
Hi Oliver
Thank you, sorting works great!
You are welcome, don’t hesitate to rate the plugin on the WP repository and/or make a donation if you like it!
there is a problem with this plugin and nextgen gallery… when it is activated.. the lightbox lightbox that occurs with nextgen when you click on a thumbnail no longer works. Just thought Id let you know
Hi Eric,
Thanks for the information. I have tried to reproduce it but I couldn’t, the lightbox effect works fine even if WATS is activated. I am using Next Gen gallery 1.3.5.
I just double checked if it was the plugin and it is… When I activate WATS the lightbox no longer works.. but if I deactivate it works fine…. I will provide you with the link to my site once it goes live this week…
How do I get the contributor’s information (or at least username) to show when the ticket is viewed?
You already have the ticket author in the default template. You can modify it by copying it to your theme directory if you want so that your modifications don’t get overriden upon WATS upgrades.
The ticket author appears on the Edit page, but not on the page of the ticket.
Is there a checkbox I missed?
If you are talking about the admin page, that’s right. This is as per WP default template.
Please allow me to restate.
The ticket contributor’s name appears on the admin page (?page=wats/wats-edit.php).
If you click on a ticket to edit, the contributor’s name does *NOT* appear (?page=wats/wats-ticket.php&action=edit&post=637). If someone comments on the ticket, their info appears.
When you view the ticket as a page, the contributor’s name does *NOT* appear (e.g. ?p=637).
How can I get the contributor’s name to appear on 1) the Ticket Edit page and 2) the View Ticket page?
I thought it would have showed up on the frontend at least… Let me have a look at this, I need to check into the code to see what I can do. I will come back to you later on next week as I am quite busy these days.
Hi Olivier!
I found one problem with sorting on pages which contain [WATS_TICKET_LIST 0] and [WATS_TICKET_LIST 1]:
Sorting works fine in most cases but when I try to sort by creation date it sorts wrong, for example: September, 1, then September, 11 and then September, 2
Hi Max,
This doesn’t surprise me. Currently, sorting works regardless data types. Everything is sorted in alphanumerical order. I will check out if something can be done to improve this.
Hi folks,
I just installed your ticketing system which is quite brilliant work. I missed a small feature (ticket summary not only as a dashboard widget but also as a page widget) so I added it and I want to share the code with you:
« Code removed and integrated into the plugin »
As always: use at your own risk
Furthermore this should maybe considered to be included in future releases (basically I just adopted the code of wats-dashboard.php with some minor changes).
One more thing I have a problem with the email feature. Doesnt send email at all. any suggestions?
Thanks for your attention
Hi Tobias,
Thanks for this, I will remove the code from your comment for clarity (already 111 comments on the post) and include it into the plugin if it works fine. I need to do some integration testings.
The email feature will send email to the administrators when a new ticket is submitted if the appropriate option is ticked within the options page. If this is the case and you aren’t receiving any email upon new ticket submission, first check out your spam folder. Then, ensure that your host is properly set up for mail relay. And finally, just let me know if you still have some problems.
@Max & Ben : 1.0.22 has just been released with some modifications to answer your requests.
Hello,
thank for your script.
I have a question
I have installed capability manager but registered user don’t see the WATS in panel because they haven’t « edit posts » permission.
I don’t want grant edit posts permission, i need to show only ticket system.
Any solutions?
Thank you
Hello,
They are few solutions possible :
1/ The easiest one is to use the guest account feature where the shared guest user will only be able to submit tickets
2/ Another one could be to remove menuitem for which the user isn’t entitled to (this can be done by unsetting the right menu array entry). Users will however still be able to access directly the page if they know the url. To prevent, you need to put redirections in place, not really easy and smooth so I would rather suggest point 1.
okay, im not understanding, im looking at the admin and i see where teh admin can create tickets. but what about regular users on the frontend? i dont see where their form is am i missing something? i assumed a frontend user would enter their problem, then on the backend, the admin can see the open tickets and fix accordingly. i appreciate any help.
Steven,
The ticket submission is always performed on the admin side. You can either ask users to register individually or use the shared guest account feature where you provide login/pass to users and then they submit the ticket using it. With this, ticket submission from robots will be very limited as it always need to login to be able to submit a ticket.
Hello Olivier!
Now sorting works well (at least now, when I have only tickets from August and September). Thank you!
Glad it works fine
Don’t hesitate to rate the plugin on WP plugins repository if you like it
Is there a way to make the Ticket number part of the permalink structure?
such as domain.com/%ticketnum%/
I am not sure if this is even feasible. This would require hooking on the permalink creation function. The issue is that you have various permalink structure so modifying it to add the ticket number would be nice if you have the one with postname but if you have another one, it may create bad stuff and 404 errors…
Sorry if this is a very basic question compared to the others.. This is a great plugin but very confusing to me…to implement it into my theme i copied the 2 theme files as suggested into my wordpress theme folder..but what do i do after that?
I created a page…but dont know what todo..basically a good tutorial on how to install this plugin would be nice as it is different to a usual plugin which does things automatically
Thank you, just representing the basic user of wordpress lol
P.S also i have noted that i have downloaded v1.0 of the wats plugin but have notice in the comments that you have released newer version…do you have to pay to get those?
So the plugin is plug and play, as most others plugins. You can copy the theme file if you want to customize these for your needs but the plugin will work by default without copying these.
Basically, you have two ways of operating the plugins with various options to meet your needs :
1/ All visitors use a guest account to submit tickets. This account has to be created by the admin and associated within the options. Then you need to provide the visitors with the login/password and from there, they will be able to submit tickets. This account will be shared between visitors.
2/ All visitors register to have their own account and submit tickets as they would submit posts.
Latest release available is 1.0.23. It has many new features and bug fixes in comparison to 1.0. You can download it from the download link on the wordpress repository (link in the post note). It is free but if you want to make a donation, you are welcome
Thank you for your quick response…im concerned about the frontend …i want users to submit tickets from the frontend not the backend..
i can submit tickets from the backend..but im talking about the display on the frontend..ok so i have installed the plugin but i am not getting anythin on the home page i cant see a list of tickets or even the form…maybe its me
Ok so you cannot submit a ticket from the frontend. You have to be connected to the admin. This is for security purposes. The fact that the user is forced to log into the admin will prevent robots from submitting fake tickets or potentially corrupting the DB.
To see the list of tickets on the frontend, just create a post and insert the relevant tag in it as per ticket listing feature (check out point 6 on the post above).
problemo solved…thanks oliver great support
One final question….can a ticket be created as in submitted from the frontend by a new registered viewer? basically i have a new user who has his own space on the website and i can seem to find out how to provide him a link to CREATE a new ticket.. the only it can be done is through the backend..but i was hoping ifit could be done through the front end…i see the user can update a ticket which has been created in the backend…but an option to create a ticket in the front end? is it possible am i missing something?
Also i have registered a user and tried going to the ticket display page but it dosent allow me to view it comes up with « Sorry, you don’t have the rights to browse this ticket. »..i can see the page when i log in as admin
THanks for the great support so far..sorry for being a pain hope you can help me
You can only submit ticket when you are logged in. What you could do is adding in the frontend a direct link to the ticket creation page in the admin.
For the rights message, you need to set an option to allow every registered user to see the tickets.
wow i am loving this support i have solved the second issue…but would love in your future releases (if not hard) to implement a frontend form for submitting new tickets.. i dont want my users to go to the backend at all
The best supported plugin by far…and i would love to donate
Thanks for your kind words!
For the frontend submission, I have thought few times about it, it is very touchy from a security point of view. I don’t want to open a breach within WP core or DB because of a miscoded form handling on the frontend.
Hey Oliver… I was wondering if you ever had a chance to look into the conflict between the NEXTGen gallery lightbox issues and this plugin??? Cause I am running the latest version of WP, NG and this plugin and the issues is still occuring… my site is http://www.caconline.ca and i currently have WATS enable on a private on a private page, but as you can see the lightbox when you click on a thumbnail is now gone, and this only occurs when i activate ur plugin… Hoping you could take a look into it.. Thanks…
Only the thickbox works… lightbox/shutterset etc… none of those ones work.. if you go to about > Department > communication and click on a picture you will notice that they do not work.
Thanks Eric, I have dropped you a mail with modified code, just let me know if it helps so that I can release it for everybody.
Hi Olivier,
Great plugin. If I want to at the status of a ticket to the index page posts what line do I have to put in between the category and comments php in class= »postmetadata »(line 23 of index.php of theme) Something like but then for the ticket status
Cheers
Marco
Hi Marco,
In the loop, just add the following function call :
wats_ticket_get_status($post)
This will return you the status so if you want to display it, just use echo wats_ticket_get_status($post).
Cheers,
Olivier
Like this I don’t know a lot about php so you really have to spell it out for me
Well, you just need to add the code into the target php file at the place where you want the status to appear. I guess this is near the meta data from what you told me.
If you want, drop me a mail through the contact form and I will help you further.
Hey Olivier
I found a bug. (maybe)
I set the ticket only be seen by creator and admins.
But if any users login the site, they can saw the ticket in recent comments of the dashboard screen.
another question is…
If the OPENID user login, they can’t see WAT in the admin panel.
Is there any way to solve it?
Hi Echo,
For the recent comments, that’s right! I haven’t thought about it! I need to check if there is a hook on this dashboard metabox to filter it.
For the Openid user login, I am not sure of what it is. I need to look into it.
Hi Echo,
I have just published 1.0.24 with two modifications to meet your requirements with regards to the recent comments :
1/ Filter the recent comments dashboard widget based on the ticket visibility setting;
2/ Added an option to remove access to comments edition menuitem for users without moderate_comments capability.
There is no SUBMIT button on the WATS Option page. I cannot save the settings!
I removed the Guest User field from the WATS Options page and it works fine now. Something is wrong with that field.
The submit button is at the bottom of the page, it is called « Save »… If you have a problem, please drop me a mail with your site url through the contact form.
Hey Olivier,
Great Job!Thanks a lot!
about OPENID
user won’t need to register the site, just use OPENID login.
There’re two plugins could do it, OpenID and JanRain RPX.
Hi Echo,
For Open ID, if the user isn’t registered, then it doens’t have a local account. Without a local account, it canno’t post tickets, just as posts… I am not sure of what a user logged in with Open ID can actually do… Sounds like a virtual account but what are the capabilities?
How do my visitors submit tickets? I do not see any way for them to do it? Am I supposed to link to a page or post?
Visitors should either register as single users (with contributor role) or use the shared guest account (that you have to setup). Anyway, they should log into the admin to be able to submit tickets.
Althought guest can open the ticket.
If there are some private tickets whose owner won’t let them be shown to others, and the site because some causes can’t be registered.
OpenID can do it.
I’m not sure about it, just consider how to make it work….
Echo,
Well, this feature sounds really specific… I am happy to provide bug fixes and support as you have seen but this is very time consuming. While this plugin is free, the development has a cost. I have spent more than 250 hours so far in the development and support.
I am sorry but based on the very small amount of donations I have received so far since WATS first release in June (5€), I don’t want to spend time on too specific features for the moment… I am quite sure that you will understand that I cannot spend free development time coding too specific features.
Echo,
I have looked at Openid and I guess it doesn’t make it with WATS because Openid users are subscribers and the minimum required level for WATS is contributor because WATS user needs the edit_posts capability in order to be able to submit tickets.
Hi,
It looks like you have the makings of a really good plugin but I find I cannot use it because of two reasons.
1. The system only allows people to log tickets via the backend of the blog (via wp-admin)
2. When you display the tickets using [WATS_TICKET_LIST 0] shortcode, one of the filters displays all the email addresses of all the registered users which is a problem for me.
I understand your security reasons for not wanting to allow people to log tickets via the front end of the blog but in my case all my members are logged in. I use a plugin from http://www.infusionsoftmembershipsoftware.com which ensures that only people who are registered can see the pages so in my case I would not have the issue.
Could you not validate that the email address is already inside WordPress before accepting the ticket.
You could also add a captcha to the new ticket form which would stop most of the bots automating the process.
Thanks for your time with this. I would love to be able to use your plugin on my site.
Hi Mark,
The wats ticket list shortcode filter doesn’t display emails. It displays users login. Now if you have set emails as users login, that’s true that it would display emails. There is however an option to restrict ticket visibility between users, check out this one, it may help.
If all you users are logged in by default to view the frontend, then that’s good, they won’t have to login to submit tickets, you just need to put a link to the ticket submission page. You can also customize the new ticket page template to make it look like your frontend if you want.
The security issue behind the ticket submission within the frontend is mostly that WP hasn’t been designed to do that. So I would have to take the admin side code and adapt it to the frontend. My fear is that I will have to remove many internal checks to make it works because the admin works with a redirection engine to enforce security and checks which you don’t have within the frontend. At this point, I don’t feel confident with this and I don’t see that as a major constraint to ask people to log into the system. There is the guest account feature for people not willing to register.
Hi, using WATS 1.0.24 there are some problems:
- Trying to rename Critical to « Vážné » – error: not allowed characters. I tried it with some other characters and it is the same (ž, š, č, etc.)
- Is it possible to add another dropdown menu? There is type, priority and status and I would like to use two other internal characteristics with some predefined values which should be fulfilled during opening ticket.
Thank you very much for your help…
Hi,
1/ Please drop me a mail with the required characters list so that I can include these. These are characters specific to your langage. Currently, there is a filter to prevent special characters from being entered for security purposes.
2/ Which additionnal dropdown menus do you want? Everything is quite static so if you want additionnal dropdowns there, I need to take a look at what can be done if that’s not too specific.
hey, Olivier
I totally understand and I really appreciate what you did.
and.. I need to say this plugin is amazing!
Thanks Echo
hi oliver, is possible have the pot or po original update? i want translate your plugin, thanks
Hi Arturo,
Thanks for this. In order to translate the plugin, just make a copy of the WATS-fr_FR.po, then rename it with the appropriate langage suffix, open it with PoEdit and translate from english to the target langages the sentences already translated to french. Don’t translate the empty ones, the translation is already included within WP Core translation. Then send me a mail through the contact form. I will reply and from there, you could send me the files as attachment.
Thanks!
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Hello
Great system I really like it however there are some tweeks i need to do.
1. How to only show the global stats for the administrator. i.e I dont want to show the user how many tickets are created and opened in their dashboards.
2. How to i get the ticket number into the email response?
3. If a user submits a ticket is it possible that the administrator does not have to publish the ticket, can it be automatic??
Hello James,
1. This needs some further coding. I need to add an option. What is the goal? Having no dashboard stats widget for all users but the admins?
2. Which mail are you talking about? The ticket creation notification?
3. Yes it can, just set ensure that the user role is not contributor but author.
Hello Olivier!
In our small team we use your plugin with great pleasure, thank you.
If you remember, you added a filter by ticket type, priority, etc. I have a suggestion – very often we want to see not tickets with exactly one status, but tickets with a statuses which are less or more than this status.
For example, often we need to see tickets with status which is smaller than Completed (so, it will include Newly open, Waiting for details, In process tickets), etc. Or, vice versa we need to see all tickets with status greater than In process (Completed and Closed tickets). Similar idea belongs to priorities, but it is not very critical.
Also another idea – add a possibility to store such filters in some form. I think it is possible to do in a form like [WATS_TICKET_LIST 0/1 a1 op1 val1 a2 op2 val2 ...] where aX is type/priority/status/owner, opX is relation (ge: >=, eq: =, etc) and valX is a value (probably a code).
I think if you add this feature it will add an additional great feature for your amazing plugin.
Thank you for your work anyway! It’s great.
Hello Max!
You are looking for advanced features here
The filtering function is already quite complex. Adding this feature could have some interest for some users but it would require a lot of work on my side.
What value would you attribute to this feature development? 1€, 10€, 100€, 1000€? My feeling is that it would require between 5 and 10 hours of coding/testing. As an engineer, customers pay from 150 to 200€ per hour to my company (my cost is around 90€).
Don’t take me bad, I won’t ask you to pay 2000€ to get this feature. I would just like to see what amount of money you would be ready to donate to me in order to get the feature implemented in a later release? I am asking this because many people asked for features since first release in June 2009 but I only had one donation which I think is a bit low if you compare this to the hundreds of hours spent on the development, isn’t it?
Hi Olivier!
Of course I understand that you spend your own time for this work and you want to get some benefit from it. As for me it’s a great and useful work and if I were a rich guy I would pay well for it, no doubt. The problem is that I’m not reach, unfortunately and my income is about 10 Eu per hour. Using of this plugin in our company was my own initiative, so the company definetely will not pay for it. I never tried to give you a hope that I’m able to pay for it, sorry if I was misunderstanded. Of course it is always up to you whether you want to implement this or that feature, who can force you… But if this plugin has extended functionality may be you have higher chances for donations. Anyway thank you for your work.
Hi Max,
No pb, I agree that you haven’t given any hope for a donation.
Hi Oliver thanks for the reply.
With regards to the email, when a ticket is sent it should be given a the unique number does that make sense?
Hi Sorry i forgot about the dashboard. The admin should only see the number of global tickets. The user/guests/authors etc… should only see the tickets which they’ve created which are open and which are closed.
I will make a donation when I have some funds
Hi James,
The ticket number is obviously unique. Each ticket has its own number. The format is based on the option (no number, number, dated number).
With regards to the dashboard, I have coded a modification based on your original feedback, isn’t it enough? Should I modify add modify the options and have two options : one for the global stats and another one for the user stats?
Hi Olivier
the dashboard should be seperated, global stats should only been seen by the administrator. i.e if 100 tickets where raised by 10 different users he should see all 100 tickets in the dashboard.
The user should only see the number of tickets raised by there account i.e joe.bloggs raised 15 tickets which are open and 5 which are closed. He should only see in his dash board 20 tickets, 15 open 5 closed. The user joe.bloggs should never see the overal number of tickets raised.
does that make sense?
Hi James,
I have performed the modification. The option will now only apply to global stats and user own stats will be always be visible individually.
1.0.29 will be posted by the end of the day.
Thanks for a great plugin Olivier! Simple but effective!
I had a small problem which I thought I had solved – but havent. I changed one of the settings – I think the root cause was setting the Shared Guest User to the admin user. From then on – I couldnt get into the admin for wordpress, it would only show the new ticket interface.
I then found the wats options key in the mySQL database and removed the following from it, leaving it blank.
*** sql entry removed ***
This almost fixed the problem – but now I have the following errors for global and personal closed tickets on my dashboard : •Number of tickets closed :
Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in D:curioushippo.comwwwrootwp-contentpluginswatswats-lib.php on line 175
I am ok to uninstall it at the moment, but I need to know what database keys to remove to ensure a clean reinstall. Can you assist? Alternatively perhaps you know how to solve this little problem.
cheers
Jon
Don’t worry!!! I fixed it: the options field was missing a whole load of stuff, so I took the shared guest user settings from the « repaired » database string, pasted into the old one above, then resubmitted the above string as my wats options. All sorted. Now time to apply the upgrade you just released!! As soon as my little site begins to bring in some money I will make you a donation. Thanks again for your efforts.
And to all users – DO NOT set your shared guest user to your main administrator account!!! Not only is it a nonsensical thing to do, it will cause you considerable grief.
Jon
Hi Jon,
Well, the issue is that the guest user is intended to be a shared account. So I have restricted it to be only able to access the ticket creation page, nothing else, for security reasons. So if you attach an admin profile to it, this admin won’t be able to do anything else than create tickets.
I think the errors you had came from the fact that you corrupted the sql entry format. As you directly change the entry, you need to update the numbers before the entry otherwise, it is messed up.
A simple workaround if the problem happens again, just remove the wats_options entry from the table and then reload the options page, this will create a new entry with default value (ie no guest user set). This will fix your issue.
Last point, you have a very nice site, cool design
Cheers,
Olivier
Hi Olivier the new update is perfect thank you, 1 more questions.
When the ticket creator get an email response from the person dealing with the ticket, the email is a bit difficult to understand. Example below. Also in the subject line of the email it has name of the blog and comments and the subject line. Is it possible to have the ticket id. for example Subject = Ticket 6 – Ticket Title. Also is it possible to remove the whois, author and just have the message?
Hi James,
What you see is the default template for comment notifications. I have performed some researches and apparently, there are some hooks so I could potentially modify this.
I will add this to my to-do list for upcoming releases…
Hi – LOVE the WATS plugin and I’ll be donating soon to your efforts BUT how can I rearrange your footer so it’s more centered and in line on my site homepage?
Also – France uses the Euro right? My American dollar donation will not be worth much
Hi Rafael,
Thanks a lot! Yes Frances uses Euro. Not much is better than nothing, trust me
For the footer issue, I would need to see the problem before I can do something. You can contact me through the contact form for more direct access.
Hi Olivier, I’m struggling. I’ve got your plugin installed but cannot work out to get anything showing up on the front end so « Subscribers » can enter tickets.
I suspect I am missing something really obvious. When I log in as an Administrator I can create a new ticket without any problem.
How do I enable the front end? Great plugin by the way!
Regs….David.
Using:-
WordPress MU V2.8.6
BuddyPress V1.1.3
Hi David,
You cannot create a ticket through the frontend. You need to use the admin side. If you don’t want users to register to be able to submit tickets, just use the guest account feature. Create a contributor level user and set it as the guest account in the WATS options. Then give the login and pass to users. This will allow them to access the ticket creation page (and only this one).
Hi Oliver,
It looks like an excellent plugin but a bit confusing as well. I am getting 2 problems. One, there is this line showing on the index page which I can’t be able to place properly.
« Wordpress advanced ticket system from l’autre monde »
It is just distorting my theme and even default theme as well.
Secondly, I am confused on how a guest user who submitted a ticket can keep track of it? I mean this user is being shared by every guest. Would not that grant every guest to be looking at each other’s tickets?
And as we are not asking for any contact information during the ticket submission, how can we assign that ticket to a new guest user if he has submitted the ticket but did not provide any contact details.
Please explain.
thanks!
Hi Touseef,
The line you are talking about should be showing up in the footer and should not break your layout design. If it is, this is because the call to wp_footer is misplaced within the footer.php file. Try to adjust it and if you can’t manage to achieve what you want, just drop me a mail through my contact form with your site access details and I will take a look at it.
If you are using the guest user feature, then definitely, every visitor using this account will be able to see other visitors tickets if they have used the guest user.
You can assign the ticket to the guest user but I agree that this isn’t really relevant as this is a shared account.
In your case, I would suggest to use dedicated accounts for each user, this would allow you to clearly identify users.
Regards,
Olivier
Well thanks for the info. I looked into the code. Actually the layout is div based with absolute widths so it was showing at the end of the footer div. I have not uploaded the site yet, still working on it localy so doent have anything to show but thanks for the offer anyways.
I also have figured out a solution that I would not be using this ticket systems for guests. For them, I gonna use a simple contact us form.
But now comes another problem.
I do not want my registered users to change the status, priority and other settings of the site. I dont find any such option in admin panel so guess I have to remove the code, right?
Or is there any other option to only allow admins to change the status/priority options of the ticket.
Ok, this is not surprising, you should increase the div width if you want it to look nice…
I am not sure I understand what you are talking about for the status, priority and other settings of the site. Who can set these if not registered users? If you want only admins to be able to modify these, just add a test within the comments template file to verify if user level is admin or not when displaying the dropdown selectors.
i want to add categorie in persian language in « Categories opened to submission » . after that when i click add buttom show this message : Error : the entry contains invalid characters
Yes, this is because you are using special characters that aren’t in my regex. Please drop me a mail with the list of persian characters so that I can add these.
i fix this problem . plz add this char in your regex .
کگچپژی
Which chars? Only the ones you have put into the comment? I can only see 6 chars. These are all persian chars?
No . if you put this char in regex the persian language is complete . in arabic language these words « گچپژ » dont exist . ک ی in persian layout is two type . one is same as arabic language and another is same as my comment above. only add these chars for support persian and arabic togheter . it’s enought
ok thanks, I will do it in the coming days.
Hello Oliver
Is it possible to raise a ticket by sending an email to a ticketing email i.e *** mail address removed to avoir spam ***
I know Request Tracker can do this, and if WATS can do this then I would a very happy chap.
Going to make a small donation.
Hi James,
Thanks a lot for the donation! This is much appreciated!
Right now, WATS can’t do what you are looking for (ie raise tickets through emails). I will look into that to see what can be done.
Cheers,
Olivier
How do I remove the copyright bar at the bottom of my front page?
Why do you want to remove it? This software is free. This copyright is the only thing I am asking for as a compensation of my hard work. I already spent 300 hours developping WATS. This copyright is on the footer, not disturbing the user so I don’t see why you would like to remove it…
If you want to discuss this further, please drop me a mail through the contact form.
Hi! Thanks for the great plugin!
When a user clicks the link in their email and goes to my site, the ticket is so wide that it moves my sidebar down below my footer on wp 2.9.1.
I have checked the css, template, single post, and single comment script and can’t figure out how to set the width of the ticket.
Any help would be great!
Thanks!
Merci!
Alan
Hi Alan,
Hard to help without a view of what’s going on. Can you please drop me a mail with your site url?
Thanks!
Olivier
This plugin is an excellent idea and I’m very glad to have found it! I appreciate your hard work to make such a unique plugin. I’m currently going through it and testing, hoping I can use your new frontend ticket submitting option. I’ve come across a problem with notification and update emails not being sent to the test client (submitting tickets). The emails come through to the admin just fine, though. Is there something I’m missing here? The ticket page link won’t work for the test client either.
Thanks!
Scott
Hi Scott,
Glad that you enjoy the plugin! Don’t hesitate to rate it on wordpress.org plugin repo, write a review about it or even make a donation!
With regards to notifications, have you checked the settings? You have to activate the notifications under the options. Then you have two kind of notifications : notifications for new tickets which are only fired to admins and notifications for updates which can be fired to anybody or only ticket originator and admins. Notifications can then be turned on/off under user profile.
Please note that there is currently no notification generated to the visitor submitting a ticket by email or through the frontend contact form.
With regards to the ticket page link, I am not sure that I understand what the problem is. Please clarify. You can drop me a mail through the contact form.
Cheers,
Olivier
Thanks Olivier,
Yes, I went through the settings and tried various things, but it looks like there wouldn’t be any client notification generated through the frontend form. Thanks for making note of that.
The issue with the access link is with the page link generated by submitting the frontend form. It is pending update by admin at first, to prevent spam which is good, but after the admin updates, the link still does not work. Tried all kinds of tricks, but there seems to be a disconnect somewhere. I hope that makes sense – doing my best to describe.
Thanks again!
Scott
Hi Scott,
For the client frontend notification, I have to say that the frontend has been implemented very recently. I still need to think about the way to notify users because notifications will be sent out to non registered non authenticated users and therefore, it will be easy for someone to have the system sending spam by submitting tickets with another user email, so I need to implement some options so that the admin understands the constraints behind this.
For the ticket link, there should be a bug somewhere. May I please ask you to send me your site url with a sample failing ticket?
Thanks!
Olivier
Hi Olivier
I am getting
Error : The ticket description is empty or contains invalid characters.
even when I am typing plain English in. It does contain a few all caps, quote marks and ( or -, but nothing fancy.
What could be the trouble?
Update…it seems to work if I take out the carriage returns (the paragraph marks).
Hi Charles,
You are right! I will publish a release fixing this by the end of the day today.
We have attempted to install this several times but it ‘takes over’ the wp-admin page so we can only see the screen for a new ticket and cannot use any of the other admin functions such as new post, new page, etc.
Hi Michael,
Which release of WATS have you installed? Which release of WP are you running? May I please ask you to send me your site details through the contact form so that I can see the problem?
Hi,
Nice work on your WATS system.
I have a couple suggestions… with regards to your widget, how about making the number of tickets a link directly to the users tickets? That way you would have to show the META if you didn’t want to.
Also when a user is viewing his tickets you have links to other tickets on that page that might not be his… instead of saying « sorry you can’t view this page » just don’t show them at all unless he is the owner of the tickets?
Thank you very much and nice work.
Kelly
Hi Kelly,
Thanks for your suggestions.
I am not sure about what you mean when you say « That way you would have to show the META if you didn’t want to ». The link in the widget should point out to which page? The edit ticket listing page in the admin side?
For the other ticket links, you are right, I will remove the link if the user doesn’t have the right to view this. I will put this in my TODO list.
Olivier
Hello Kelly,
Good news, I have fixed the previous/next link problem. This is a bug related to WP 2.9. Shouldn’t happen in 2.8. I will post a release containing the fix in the coming days when I would have a bit more content to share.
Olivier
Sorry about that… what I meant to say was… if that you fixed the Tickets Widget to supply a link to the logged in users tickets then you would not need to add the META widget to the side bar.
It would be a simple way for the user to get at their tickets; I think it makes logical sense.
It would be really great that if the link from the widget point out to a page that list all their open tickets, if you really wanted to get fancy that same page could have a show/hide button for previously closed tickets as well, if I’m asking I guess you could have a sort function also.
Thanks again for taking care of the other issues and I look forward to your response.
Kelly
Hello Kelly,
Well I think there is a better solution for you :
1/ Customize the meta widget options just to show up the login link.
2/ Add a text widget and enter into it the link to the frontend ticket list. The frontend ticket list is way better than the admin one, it includes filtering and sorting functions, just try it, you will love it I guess.
Regards,
Olivier
Ok cool Olivier… I didn’t know you could modify the META widget… I’m a new at this… I’ll look things over and fix them up… what is the link to the front end ticket list?
Thanks agian,
Kelly
Kelly,
Yes you could modify it, just check out the options on the widget page.
For the frontend ticket list, you should create a post with the ticket list tag (check out the feature description, point 6, on this post).
Regards,
Olivier
Thanks for all the help Olivier!
Kelly
Hi Oliver is there anyway of switching off the donate button in the WAT Options?
Hi James,
Do you want to kill my only source of revenue for this plugin?
I won’t put an option to remove the donate button, this wouldn’t make sense honestly. I don’t want to have two separate streams, one official with the donate button and one unofficial without the donate button for selected customers, this would be too painfull to maintain.
What’s the issue with the donate button. You only have it on the options page. It isn’t as if you had it on all pages which would be a bit intrusive…
Thanks Olivier, I sent you the information required
Thanks for fixing the « won’t post with carriage return »
Still won’t post if I have a URL in the message.
Yes, you are right, I haven’t allowed the « / » for security reasons. But since I remove all the html tags on ticket submission, I think that’s ok to have the « / » in the description. I have just uploaded a new release fixing this issue.
Hi Oliver
I have noticed a little glitch when you send an email to open a ticket. In the options I have tickets to publish straight away. However there showing as pending. Is there a way to get the tickets to publish straight away?
Also I have the widget Pretty Links which changes the URL for a post. Is there away either to drop the link to the front end or match the URL name?
Hi James,
The option you are talking about is related to the frontend submit form, not the email submission.
For the email submission, the status is always pending for security reasons because it is better to have a moderation before publication as you can send what you want through email and easily use someone else identity.
For the second point, I really don’t understand what you are talking about, can you please clarify?
Hi Oliver
OK to be honest with the email going to pending the link to the front end does not work as its not published. If there could be an option to have the option to switch on the security as I know I will be able to tell very quickly if a ticket is spam or not.
This then means the front end link will work on the first email notification.
if its too much to do then I understand as this most absorb alot of your time.
Its a wish more than a must have.
Hi James,
Well, ok, I’ll put this on the TODO list for upcoming releases
Hi Oliver
Just installed and liking it so far, however I am not getting admin emails, despite setting the
‘Notify admin by email upon new ticket submission’
Other emails from the site are OK. Do you have any suggestions on what might be wrong?
Mark
Hi Mark,
There could be two reasons for this :
1/ you have turned off the local profile option for this admin
2/ the user you are using doesn’t have admin level
You can send me your site details through the contact form if you want me to check out your settings.
Olivier
Hi Olivier,
Thanks for your great work!
I have two concerns you might be able to help me with:
When a user clicks the link to view their ticket on my site, the template is very wide and kicks my sidebar down below the ticket. I saw you said to edit and copy single-ticket.php and comments-ticket.php them to my theme directory. I tried that and not sure what to edit on these files.
Also, when I enter my mail information (also clicking allow email submission button) and hit update the information is not saved and I am unable to submit a ticket via email.
Any help with these questions would be great!
Thank you.
Alan
Hi Alan,
For the theme, you can copy the file as I have said to your theme directory. Then get to your theme edition folder and edit these files as you usually edit your other theme files. Having said that, I am not sure on what is to wide for your template. A link to your site would help me understanding better your problem and help.
For the mail information, I guess it is not saved because you have entered improper characters into the fields so it goes back to default values.
Regards,
Olivier
Wats breaks the Multipage toolkit mod for WP
Shawn,
That’s possible, WATS hasn’t been tested against all other plugins… I would be happy to help if I can. Please provide additionnal details…
I have WATS setup on my site, but It doesn’t post to categories correctly with the frontend. ALL of the tickets go to « Uncategorized » and I do not want that.
You should set the default category option under the options for tickets posted through the frontend.
Hi Oliver
Sorry me again… I am not sure if I have asked this before..
Once a ticket is created and published for example Admin replies to ticket. The user then replies to the email with his comments the comments from the user do not show.
Is this possible and if it is what settings do I have to play with…
Sorry to keep asking questions.
Hi Olivier!
Thanks for getting back to me.
About the ticket result being too wide for my template, here is the link to an opened ticket:
*** credentials removed ***
to view the ticket.
Thanks!
Alan
@James : You are welcome
Only new ticket submission can be achieved by email. Ticket updates have to be performed through the comment form on the single ticket page.
@Alan : I would suggest you to send me your site details through my contact form next time. When you write a comment here, everybody can see it…
With regards to your issue, the ticket template is based on Kubrick wordpress default theme so it may not fit your theme. To fix this, just copy the single-ticket.php to your theme directory and edit it to match your single post template. This should do the trick.
BTW, your website is really nice
Thanks again Olivier,
I thought about displaying that and it was a user with subscriber access only.
Thanks, I will do as you recommended and let you know it works.
I appreciate the compliment! Gotta give credit to pagelines for the theme
Hi Olivier,
Thanks for all your help. I have three things you might be able to help me with.
1.Editing single-ticket.php and it fixed the template problem. It does however show duplicate reply boxes and I don’t see it calling for anything twice in the code. It’s not a big deal but would be nice to fix.
2.For some reason the upload file option is not displayed on the ticket when I select it in wats options.
3.My mail info is still going blank for email capabilities.
Maybe these are because of another plugin I am running. Do you know of any other plugins that may cause wats to not function properly?
If you still have the info I gave you, you can check the ticket about topic 1. If not I will submit to your email contact form.
Thanks again for all your help!
Hi Alan,
1. Really strange… I would need to take a look at your site if you agree… Please drop me a mail with the details, I never keep these kinds of details for safety reasons… You can also send me directly the code of your single-ticket.php
2. The upload file is related to the ticket creation page in the admin. You cannot upload from the frontend.
3. I need to understand what you put into the email capabilities, there may be a problem with my checks.
I would like to create list tickets of certain categories. So, I’d like to have one page that would divide the tickets of certain categories into seperate tables. Is there a shortcode to define a specific category instead of the category of the post?
Thanks
No there isn’t right now. You can only display tickets belonging to the same category or all tickets.
This feature sounds very specific. Please contact me through the contact form to provide more details.
Sorry about not using the ticket – I can’t find it (don’t read French).
I had to disable the plugin on my WPMU/BP setup. When the plugin is enabled, I cannot upload media into a post. (Media Library tab is NOT displayed and any uploaded media will NOT insert into a post. As soon as I disable your plugin, everything starts working fine.
Have you checked the options? There are few things to set around the upload media.
I do not understand. Are you saying that there are options in your plugin to get around the upload issue? I will check it out again but I did not see anything remotely suggesting that.
Is there is no fix for the problem with your plugin? Uploading media is important for my sites and I have not found a way to make it work as long as your plugin is activated. Do you have some « options »? Please tell me.
Yes please check out the options, there are few options around the media upload.
Another point, you are using WPMU. I haven’t tested my plugin with WPMU so there may be a bug there. If you want me to troubleshoot, I will need access to your site.
Hello Olivier, I have the spanish translation for the plugin wats.
where can I send you the .po file for integrate into the plugin?
Esteban
Ola Esteban,
Please drop me a mail through my contact form. I will then reply so that you can then send the .po file directly.
Thanks!
Olivier
I tried the options but it still conflicts with other plugins and the upload function. I decided to try an alternative product which seems much more complete and does not conflict. It does not work with MU either but the developers are working on that now.
Thank you for your efforts.
Ray,
There could few reasons for this issue to happen. I am not saying that there isn’t a bug. If you want me to help and troubleshoot, you need to give me access to your site so that I can undertand the problem. I don’t have WPMU setup.
Which SQL entries do I have to remove to make sure it’s entirely cleaned ?
I’ve installed it but it’s not for me, so I’ve uninstalled it but would like to keep my sql clean as well.
If you haven’t created any ticket, you just need to remove the wats option entry in the options table. Otherwise, you will also have to check the post meta table.
Hello Olivier,
Can you help please. I like your plugin very much.
My problem is that after installation, it seriously slows down the website. loading time of the pages increases too much.
Is there anything I can do to eliminate this problem?
Thank you, kornel kathi
Hello Kornel,
Are you sure that this is related to WATS? I have performed a test with your site and page load time is 7 seconds (which is average, not worse, not best).
I have paid attention to WATS file loading time and it isn’t that huge. What I saw is that your blog is loading two versions of jQuery, one of these isn’t minified. Your theme also has a lot of pictures. You might want to optimize this…
Olivier;
I cannot seem to activate your plug-in (or any others when wats is present in the plugins directory. When I click « Activate » on any plugin in my plugins management panel, a blank plugins.php file is downloaded to my computer.
What am I doing wrong?
Rent,
I don’t know what you are doing wrong. Are you in php5? This is the first thing to check. Then if it doesn’t help, retransfer the plugin file. Then contact me through the contact form with your site details.
Here’s the site detail information:
***
Ok your php version is fine… It should come frome something else. Please retransfer the files. If it doesn’t work, then contact me through my contact form.
re-transfering does not address the issue. Also noted that when wats is present in the plugins directory I cannot directly access wp-admin
Hmmm, have you set the guest user feature? Please contact me through my contact form with the site details, I will help you.
I installed your program and now whenever I try to get to my dashboard I get a page requesting a support ticket. I was going to uninstall WAT and then reinstall it but I cannot find it even listed in the plug-ins. Please help ASAP thanks.
Hi David,
This happened probably because you assigned your admin user as the guest user. The guest user is a shared user which is used only for ticket creation. You should create a dedicate user for this and not use your admin account.
I am unable to get to my admin panel per my email last night. Could you fix this for me, note your donation balance.
To fix the issue, remove temporarly the wats entry in the wp_options table in the mysql DB.
Hi Olivier!
I recently use your Plugin for my projects. It is very nice, thanks. I also build some plugins for wordpress but until now, i didn’t find out, how to integrate the native rich text editor (tinymce or deans fckeditor) onto textareas like in your plugin (1st screenshot). Can you tell me how to do that?
Thanks and greetinmgs to France!
Thomas
Hi Thomas,
This is probably one of the most complex task to achieve. There are few scripts that need to be loaded in a very specific order. Please check out the sources, this will help you.
Olivier
[...] WATS Wordpress Help Desk Plugin A Wordpress plugin for running a help desk within Wordpress. [...]
Great plugin. Serves my purposes pretty well, except for one major issue and one more minor issue.
First, I want to turn this into a knowledgebase system where all tickets are searchable by registered users but the tickets are only editable by admin and ticket creator.
Alternatively, and possibly even better, although more complicated, would be if other users could search/read all tickets and could comment on all tickets, but could not change any of the « priority, categorization, type, etc. » fields.
The second issue that I have is that, no matter what theme I use with this plugin, on the view ticket page (the single post page containing the ticket conversation), my sidebar always ends up sitting BELOW the content of the ticket, instead of to the right of it.
Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.
Hi Mike,
For the first issue, this would require some customization of the theme files but sounds feasible.
For the second issue, should be an incompatibility problem between your theme and WATS theme file, just edit WATS theme file to match your theme.
If you need further assistance, please contact me through the contact form.
Thanks for the response. I assumed some customization of the code would be necessary to address first issue. Are you in a position to be able to do that?
As for the second issue, I’ve tried editing the WATS file to make it work, but can’t figure out what’s causing the issue. I’ve tried it with about 5 different themes and they all do the same thing.
Hi Mike,
Yes should be feasible. Please drop me a mail through the contact form so that we can discuss further the subject.
Hello Olivier.
I also can’t to activate WATS-1.0.50 plugin. When I click Activate, I get an error:
Connect failed
Your request for … could not be fulfilled, because the connection to localhost could not be established.
I download other plugin WATS-1.0.29. I can activate, but I want use the last plugin, where I can use tags like…
Can You give me some advice about my problem?
I use PHP 5.3.2, Apache 2.2.14, MySQL 4.1
Thanks a lot.
P.S. Sorry my poor English
Hi Alisher,
Something should have been improperly setup or you are using a conflicting plugin. Please desactivate all plugins, then activate WATS and then others plugins one by one to see which one is causing troubles.
Thanks to Olivier for the plugin! I’m testing it out. If it meets my needs I will definitely donate.
Re: URLS — is there a way to define different paths for all tickets? So instead of:
mysite/2010/05/ticket-name-is-here/
we could define something like:
mysite/support/helpdesk/ticket-name-is-here/
globally and automatically without having to manually do it at the per-ticket level?
Some folks may find more answers in this post. I’d agree with some of the user interface thoughts. 1 request for future versions: add « settings » as a submenu item to the main Ticket menu/section on the admin. And also explanation about how to add forms to pages.
http://weblogtoolscollection.com/archives/2010/01/29/plugin-review-wordpress-advanced-ticket-system/
Thanks again!
Another question / comment: regarding assigning tickets to registered users: this works with Buddy Press members? So a Buddy Press member logs in and if that person submits a ticket WAT assigns the ticket to that BuddyPress member/profile?
Thanks!
Hi Harold,
The permalink structure follows WP permalink structure so it is up to you to define it to match your preferences in the WP settings.
The interface has been improved since the weblogtoolscollection review to follow his advise. The explanation on how to add forms is easily found in this post. Just take the time to go through it, it will take only 5 minutes and you will understand better how it works.
I don’t intend to consolidate the options with the WATS ticket submenu. I want to follow WP philosophy which is options with options. This is they 90% of the plugins work.
For the Buddy Press question, I have absolutely no idea! Just try
If these are recognized as WP members, it should work, at least for some parts.
receiving this: at the top of my pages when accessing the submission form on my site.
User detailsLogged in as adminTicket detailsTicket type : QuestionSW BugInstallation requestFeature requestTicket priority : EmergencyCriticalMajorMinorTicket status : Newly openUnder investigationWaiting for reoccurenceWaiting for detailsSolution deliveredClosedTicket owner : Noneadmintestadminttest2adminTicket titleTicket description » />
Yes and so? What do you expect from me? What can I do for you? I can’t help with so few details…
I want to localize WATS in my language. I need your help. Can you email me please.
Hello Olivier.
I need help. I want to add the category in russian language in «Categories opened to submission», but I can’t. I had an error message : Error : the entry contains invalid characters.
And second question: How can I switch the language in WATS plugin to the russian?
Can you help with advice? Thanks a lot..
Hello Alisher,
Please drop me a mail with the characters, I would need to integrate these. The Russian translation isn’t yet available so you can’t switch the plugin to Russian.
Olivier,
Is there a way to uninstall WATS completely aslo from the database?
Because appartenely the modify/edit button is not showing anymore in the admin page and I cant add any new categories/status anymore.The pages keeps loading itself when i try to add something
Rachid,
Which release of WP are you using? WATS is working fine with 2.8 and 2.9.
To remove WATS, just remove the WATS directory (after having disabled it in the plugins page) and also remove the WATS option entry from the wp_options table in the DB.
Hi Olivier,
I have two issues with WATS that may be related:
1) I cannot get an email sent to admin on ticket submission no matter what options I select. I have WATS running on a different blog and it works fine.
2) this might be related, but when I administer a user none of the WATS show up at the bottom « assign to this user » etc.
Do you have any idea why this might be?
I run WP 2.9.2 and also run buddypress 1.2.3. It works fine on some of my other blogs but not Piphut.com
Thanks,
Mark
Hi Mark,
1/ This should be a problem with your mail relay configuration. Are you able to get mail notifications out of this blog from any other plugin? Have you checked your spam folder?
2/ I don’t really understand. You are talking about the ticket assign feature on the single ticket page? Have you set the feature in the WATS options page?
Olivier
[...] WATS : of voluit Wordpress Advanced Ticket System waarmee je makkelijk een helpdesk kan oprichten & beheren [...]
1) It is just the first email. All subsequent emails (updates, etc) work just fine. Checked the spam folder and it is not there.
2) In WP admin if you go to Users and then select a user, with WATS some options should show up about whether you can assign tickets to this user, receive emails, etc. It shows up on my other blog using WATS but not PipHut
Hi Olivier
I have the helpdesk installed but am stuck on the following and hope you can help me please:
1. I need to create a new field for company(for each of our clients) and then assign certain users to that company so when they log a call it goes under their company.
2. I need admins to be able to log calls for clients aswell so they can select a company at ticket creation time(on the front end and on the dash board)
3. How can I select the user that the ticket is logged by when logging a ticket as an admin for someone else on the front end?
Thank you very much
Regards
Denzil
Ps you may publish this.
Hi Mark,
1/ I would need more details on the scenario. Where is the ticket submitted (through admin with guest user, through admin with any user, through mail, through frontend submission form with what type of user, etc…).
2/ Ok I see what you mean. Are you editing this user with an admin?
1) frontend submission and I’ve tried multiple scenarios – guest user, registered user, admin – all with same results.
2) yes, my account is the only administrator account
Hi Denzil,
1/ I don’t really see what you would like to achieve. What do you mean by « a call goes under their company »?
2/ This can be done on the admin with the call center feature.
3/ Right now, this can only be achieved on the admin side.
If you need customization services and new features, please drop me a mail through the contact form.
Regards,
Olivier
Mark,
The notification problem should be related to the second issue you have. I would need to troubleshoot on your site, please drop me a mail through the contact form.
Is there anyway to have an unregistered visitor receive email notifications when I update a ticket?
Right now it appears I have to select a default user for any unregistered tickets, meaning that whatever email address is associated with the default user receives the emails, not the email address that was submitted with the form.
This feature isn’t yet available in WATS, maybe later…
Hi Olivier
Thank you for your earlier reply, I thought Id write a more detailed explination of my requirements below for you as I wasnt very descriptive before.
Basicly we are a small IT company that support external clients. With this in mind I would to know if the following can be achived:
1. I need to create a seperate catagory in the service desk where I can create companies(each client of our will be a company)
2. I need to create users that are linked to those companies(eg userA belongs to componyA) and when userA logs a call it is logged under companyA automatically.
3. All my helpdesk staff will be admins, so I need admins to be able to log calls on behalf of any company on the front end(to select the company when the call is created)
4. I need to perform searches by dates as well
5. I need to print a report based on my searches
6. Calls tat are opened must default to open not closed
7. At the moment tickets are opened on our blog archives, we need tis to go to general instead.
8. I need to have a user that can see and work with all calls for all companies and users but not be able to modify the servicedesk settings
9. All this needs to be done on the front end.
10. Is there a way to record time?
Thank you for your time!
Regards
Denzil
[...] WATS (also known as Wordpress Advanced Ticket System) is another plugin with ticket submission that turns your Wordpress site into its own little CRM. In the backend, there’s an administration panel which has the ticket submission module, and the front end has associated pages creation. A little more advanced than the “Support Tickets” plugin if you are looked for extra ‘oomph’…I guess you would say. [...]
I have WATs set up so that my clients can come to the front end and post a ticket.
How can I make it so that when I leave an update they are notified?
Thanks.
There are some notifications options for this on the wats options page, please check out these.
Right now I am not getting updates as the user when a ticket is updated by the admin.
In WATS settings I have this option enabled:
Notify user by email when ticket is updated. Applies only to tickets originated by the user.
However, if I go to edit that user this option is set to no:
Get a mail notification when a ticket originated by me is updated
You have to set the user profile option to yes in order to get the notification.
So I need to adjust that for every user that registers?
The same issue applies to allowing people to upload Media. I have the option set to yes in settings, but the default when a user is created is no.
Yes this is normal and expected behaviour. This is because by default most of the admins don’t want users to receive notifications or to be able to upload media. Therefore you need to turn this on if you want users to be able to get these. Please note that if you want to do this for all users, a direct mysql query through phpmyadmin might be quicker than going through all the pages…
I think we must be talking about two different things.
What I am looking for is this
1. A new user enters a ticket, on my site they will be forced to register first.
2. Once registered they can login and create a ticket. In a perfect world they would get an email letting them know this ticket has been created. I as the admin of the site would also be notified via email (already works this way).
3. When I respond to the ticket, the user who created the ticket should get an email notifiying them of my response. This is the part that I thought the settings noted above controled.
Basically, how do I configure users to get notified when their ticket receives a response.
I have checked the code further to see the exact behavior.
Right now, if you haven’t saved the user profile since WATS installation, users registered prior to WATS installation will get the notification if the global option is turned on.
If a user registered after WATS had been installed, he won’t get any notification unless the option is active globally and the user profile option has been activated as well.
With regards to your points :
1. Yes, this isn’t an issue, you can enforce this by enabling the frontend submission form for registered users only.
2. Right now, only the admin gets a notification upon new ticket creation. I am planning on adding notification for ticket originator as well but not yet coded.
3. Yes, it should work if the global and local options are set appropriately.
I’m using a few different page style sheets on my site and have a sidebar by default but don’t want it to show up on individual ticket pages. I’m able to set the page style for the ticket list and submission pages but not for individual ticket pages. How do I change the default style WATS uses on ticket pages?
You need to copy the default theme files from the WATS theme directory to your own theme directory and then edit them to remove the sidebar.
Thanks Olivier. Second question. Admins are not receiving notification of new ticket submission. How do I troubleshoot this? It’s a clean install with the notification option on. Not sure what to try to remedy
Please go under the individual user profile and turn on the admin notification as well.
Is there any way to set notify admin by default for all users?
Yes, you have two ways to achieve this :
1/ Every time you update a user, you update a user profile, you set the option to yes. If you don’t update the profile, the option item will not exist and WATS will act as if it was set to yes.
2/ Perform a direct mysql query to inject the option value for every user.
The first option is a bit confusing. The option is not set by default. How do I create a user without updating them. Is there any way to simply set this option to yes by default in the WATS.PHP or WATS-PROFILE.PHP eliminating the possibility of turning it off at all?
When you create a user, the option is created and set to « no » by default. It is just if the user was created long time ago before WATS was activated that the option isn’t set (equivalent to set to « yes »).
With regards to your request, I think I would need to add an option to bypass the profile setting and only take into consideration the global setting. Would that be ok for you? Do you use the same notification option for all users?
For me the option that makes the most sense is to allow the admin and the users to automatically receive email updates.
Only when the user opts out of the email notification should it be turned off.
To me, when using support tickets 99% of people are going to want to be notified via email.
Well, I have a different perception. Notification could be seen as SPAM by users. Some might not want to receive these and won’t understand how to turn these off. So my preference is to have a voluntary action where users willing to have notifications will turn this on, this is more respectfull for everybody I think.
I agree that often auto-sent messages seem like spam. However, in the case of the support ticket system, the user has requested support, and they are pending an immediate update. I do not think they would expect to have to request to be sent emails when updates occur.
A compromise would be what you have on this form, where the user can opt in directly from the submission for, that was it is voluntary but easy for them to do.
Bypassing the profile setting with the global is perfect. I would use the same notification option for all users. Which would be notify the user when tickets are updated and notify all admins when there is a new ticket by anyone. Limiting notification to a users own tickets should stay as is.
@Hakuna :
This would be a per-ticket notification setting, not really easy to manage. I don’t want to mix profile option with ticket submission.
@Javier :
Ok, I would add an option to bypass local setting.
@Both :
If you like this plugin, please consider making a donation
+1 – What Javier said « Bypassing the profile setting with the global is perfect. I would use the same notification option for all users. Which would be notify the user when tickets are updated and notify all admins when there is a new ticket by anyone. Limiting notification to a users own tickets should stay as is. »
This is exactly what I would like as well
Ok, I will code this enhancement in the coming weeks. Feel free to make a donation to motivate me
Will do Olivier. Thank you!
Great, thanks a lot!
@ Javier & Hakuna :
Release 1.0.52 has just been posted and contains the requested feature!
Feel free to make a donation, thanks
@Oliveir
I will install the new updates later this week and let you know how it goes.
This is a great work, thank you for the plugin. I have some questions if you dont bother:
1. How can I associate a ticket to a category. When I add a new ticket it always goes to the uncategorized.
2. After I create the ticket, there is a message saying « you will be able to access it here » where « here » is a link to a page ?p=215 what is this?
thanks
i have installed and configured the plugin , this will assist me very much in my business endeavors as i am an IT technician , ITLabs is my company …
the issue that i an having is that when i go to input a ticket i get the message
« You are not allowed to create posts or drafts on this site. »
please let me know how i might be able to rectify the situation , thanks
@Gustavo :
1/ You can associate the ticket to categories after ticket creation, through the admin. Direct ticket association on the frontend submission form isn’t possible so far. Maybe later, requires further development.
2/ This is the permalink to the ticket single page.
@Rasta :
You have WP 3.0, isn’t it? WATS hasn’t yet been tested against it. I was waiting for the final release to be delivered to do so. You will need to wait for a 3.0 compatible release to use it or rather use it with WP 2.9.2.
Hi,
the WATS system looks very promising for my small software project.
I have the same problem as Rasta with WP 3.0. I cannot create or edit tickets in the backend. Frontend submission somehow works. Also if I use the direct link from the sent email I can edit the ticket which was created via frontend.
The [WATS_TICKET_LIST 0] tag also leads to an error and does not list tickets:
Warning: implode() [function.implode]: Invalid arguments passed in [...]wp-content/plugins/wats/wats-template.php on line 91
It would be very cool if WATS would work with WP 3.0!
Regards,
Tobias
Hi Tobias,
You are right, it would be very cool if it could work with WP 3.0. It would also very cool if I’d received some donations as a recognition of the work performed on WATS for more than a year now…
The new release will come sometime in the coming weeks but I have to eat (as everybody) and therefore, I can’t spend my life on projects that don’t bring me any money. I am quite sure you can understand this.
Cheers,
Olivier
Hi Olivier,
I fully understand you. It’s a fundamental problem of free software. How to make money with it? I can’t really answer that, but I think that 99,9% ignore the donation button.
Nevertheless I’m always happy that there are guys like you who help thousands of other people without getting money for it. And you are right – you should get more recognition for that.
I wish you all the best. You are doing great work.
Regards,
Tobias
Thanks Tobias…
You would be my super hero if you got a fix for 3.0.
For some stupid reason I had an auto update on WP and it bumped me to 3.0 and now WATS is a mess. I’m an artist, so I know how it is doing something you love and enjoy and not being paid for it.
I am able to make tickets on the front end, but when you click on the front end links, 404 bad links. On the back end I get « You are not allowed to create posts or drafts on this site. » but You can click on the older post and atleast view the ticket content.
If this is a quick fix man, I would so be in debt to you. I like you dont have $$ to burn, but I am very talented in design as you can see from my site. So if you ever need graphics/flash or whatever I have you covered.
Jason,
Thanks for your comment. I didn’t had a chance yet to take a look into WATS vs WP 3.0. I will let you know once I have something to share.
Thanks for your offer for graphics, I will take it for sure
Thanks man… I will be ready to test it out when you have something.
I just updated my site to WP 3.0, and I found the WATS plugin was breaking general blog posts marked Private. They were no longer showing up in the Recent Posts widget, and if I tried to view them from the Admin backend, I’d get the dreaded error 404.
Deactivating your plugin, fixed things.
WATS isn’t yet supported in WP 3.0. This is clear in the readme.txt… The maximum release is 2.9.2 so far…
Hello,
just wanted to let you know that after updating to WP 3.0 WATS stopped the categories from working. The menu entry under articles disappeared, as well as the selection box in the article editor and even in my theme. As I use categories for navigation and paths, nearly everything was out of order. Took me some time to figure out that it was WATS.
I am not complaining, I just want you to know. I am still in the process of setting up my first WP site and had installed WATS just the other day…
Hello Claudia,
Thanks for the feedback, I will look into that.
Au boulot pour la MàJ
Trop cool! Tu me donnes un coup de main? Histoire d’avoir une MAJ dispo avant WP 4.0?
Hey c’est pas moi qui ai une cohorte de fans prêt à tout pour utiliser cette extension
Prêt à tout, n’exagérons rien… Ils ne sont même pas prêts à faire un modeste don
i got this message after i put the short code in a new page:
Sorry, the ticket submission form access has been disabled by the admin.
how to fix it?
Get into the options and enable the frontend submission form.
WP 3.0 compatible release will come once I would have reached 500€ of donations :
http://www.lautre-monde.fr/wats-and-wp-3-0/
i did’t see any option there. Just got Ticket manager and Add New Ticket Option.
printscreen and show us the Option pls.
Check out the wats options page in the options menu.
i did’t see any option there. Just got Ticket manager and Add New Ticket Option.
printscreen and show us the Option pls.
all picture above u just showing
Ticket List
Edit Ticket
so where is the Option to enable user front end submit ticket without register?
This isn’t in that menuitem but in the settings panel! You must be an admin to set this one. Please check out the wats option page on the settings panel.
Sorry coz making trouble here.
u r gr8..but i cant see what said.
forget it.
Keep Moving Forward
I have dropped you a mail with a screen capture.
yeah thanks..!!!
what version is it?
i got no like that.
gimme the file link here. thank. u reallly rock!
All WP releases from 2.7 to 2.9 should have these. Please contact me through email for further support, this will be easier.
Hi Olivier,
Great work with the plugin. I also can’t believe you’re helping out so much here. You should definitely create a premium version on the script and charge for it! But, until you do that I have one question
I have a problem with the frontend. When a ticket is created I get a link to access it but whenever I open those links it says « Page not found ».
Do you know what could be the problem?
Thanks a lot and once again – great work!
Hi Alex,
Yes, this is because the ticket hasn’t yet been approved by an admin. So it is in pending status and couldn’t be browsed until an admin would have approved it…
I am more and more thinking about the premium version, will see
Thanks for the fast reply! Appreciate it very much!
However, I have another problem now, I’ve changed a few options with WATS and now when I want to login to my admin panel I get redirected here: admin.php?page=wats/wats-ticket-new.php
I can’t do anything in my WP admin panel because I get redirected there
Got any advice for me?
Also, is there any way to make the tickets available for viewing right after submission? I’ve tried going for that option to make them all « publish », but I still see page not found…
Thanks for your help!
Hi Alex,
You should have set the guest user to your user… To recover from this, you need to edit the options with another admin user if you have one or get into the DB through php my admin and remove the wats options entry.
For the ticket status, you should use the ticket publication status option and set it to « publish » (last option value).
Hallo, great plugin. One question, does wats use js even in the frontend? I’ve a menu done in js (jquery-1.4.2.min.js and jquery.easing.1.3.js) and it almost quit working on the page where wats is running. If I turna off wats the menu back working well. Any thoughts?
Thx
.mik
Hello Mik,
Yes WATS is using JS for the ticket listing and the frontend submission form. There should be a conflict somewhere between WATS and your menu. These things could happen when you have few JS running on the same page.
I would need to see the problem to get a better understanding on it and see if there is anything that can be done on my side. Please drop me a mail with your site details through the site contact form.
Cheers,
Olivier
So are you going to release this for free or make it a premium plugin? I can’t donate 500 euros but I could pay 20 for a license. Which way are you leaning?
I am not asking you to donate 500€. I am just suggesting to participate to the contribution chain towards the target of 500€ which will unlock the delivery of the new release for all users. So 20€ is fine. If you make a donation of 20€, you’ll get the new release in the coming days.
With regards to free or premium plugin, I haven’t yet made a decision. I guess it will be based on the amount of donations I would have received by the end of the month. At a point, I need to see if the community is ready to contribute in exchange to what I have done so far or if it is in its majority freebies who don’t care about other’s work and will never… In that case, I guess I would have to focus on the users that deserve it.
so if i donate you’ll release it or release it to me. I’m not going to donate without an assurance of when I’ll get something.
If you make a donation, you’ll get the release within few hours after you made the donation (assuming that you don’t make a 1€ donation)…
Hello, (I speak english only : )
My name is Derek Little and I create Wordpress websites for customers. I have found your plug-in at Wordpress.org.
I have been struggling (for the last few days)to use it to fill a role on my Customer Support Website. But so far I have not had much luck.
Here are the challenges I am trying to overcome.
1. I want to assign every user their own login/password, but I do not want them to be able to edit other pages (as an editor) – just access and review their own tickets.
2. If everyone logs in as a guest user, how can I identify who is sending the support request. (I want everyone’s information to remain private)
3. After creating a test ticket, there is a link to view the ticket – which gives me « page not found » (I can’t get this to work; not sure how to configure it)
If you can see how your plug-in would work for me, I am open to your ideas.
If I can get it working and interest my customers in your plug-in, perhaps I can send you ideas for developing a paid version you can sell online.
Thanks,
Derek Little
Hi Derek,
What you want to achieve is feasible with WATS.
Basically, you have two options :
1/ Have every user to register as a subscriber and then use the front end submission form to submit tickets.
2/ Have every user to register as a contributor and then use either the front end submission form or the admin page to submit tickets. To prevent them from editing other pages, you can use the adminize plugin to remove access to specific menuitems.
I would suggest you to start with option 1, probably the easiest and smooth one to implement.
For the link to the newly created ticket, this is because you have set tickets to remain in pending status until they are published by an admin. Therefore, they aren’t accessible.
Regards,
Olivier
I was thinking about switching to WATS from what I am currently using, but it does not appear to work correctly with Word Press 3. Is there a planned WATS release for support of the latest Word Press version in the near future?
As for donating money… I would prefer to donate only after I know the product will work for my needs.
Thanks,
Gary
Ah, I see your remarks about WP3 in the above comments. I have no problem donating, but I need to be sure the product will work before I pay money for it. :/
Do you have demo site for WP3 that can be played around with maybe?
Hi Gary,
I don’t really have any demo site. If you want, you can test the plugin with 2.9.2, the release available on WP repository works fine with it. It isn’t a big deal to install a WP test site for this. Then if it suits your needs, you can make a donation and you’ll get the 3.0 compatible release. This release is available only to contributors for now.
Tried this plug-in, Its has all the necessary features. But lacks in detail testing.
I installed this plug in,
> category disappeared from the menu and in new post
> Front end, my side bar widgets, duplicated don’t know why
Hope the author releases a new update
Shovan
Hi Shovan,
I think you haven’t checked the WP repository. The release you have tested isn’t compatible with WP 3.0. If you want to get the new release compatible with WP 3.0, please think about making a donation…
Olivier
Hi, when i activate the plugin, my category menù on the left of admin backend disappears and too in the new/edit article, how i can fix it?
Thanks.
I can’t seem to make this viable to guests or registered users. Help?
@Grollaz :
Yes, you are using WP 3.0 with a WATS release that isn’t compatible with WP 3.0 thus encountering this kind of problems. You can fix this by making a donation. This will allow you to get the new release.
@Jennifer :
I don’t understand your question, please provide further details.
Olivier,
I think your plugin may be just what I’ve been looking for. I see that the version compatible with 3.0 is available after donation only, which I can certainly understand – from reading some of the other comments, it’s cleat that you’ve put a lot of work into this.
My questions to you – I can only seem to create tickets by email, which is fine, as this is what I prefer. However, the body copy of the email does not carry through. Is this corrected in the latest version of your plugin?
#2 – The tickets created by email show as pending, and even with the admin login, I am unable to Publish or even save the ticket. Is this fixed?
#3 – my Guest user, as a Contributor, cannot save tickets. Nor are tickets created with the form successfully submitted.
If you can guarantee me that these 3 issues are fixed in your WP3.0 compatible version, I will be happy to donate to receive it. I just want to be sure that it will solve the problems that I am having, or be guaranteed a refund if it is not working, and I am unable to use the plugin.
Thank you!
Terri
Hi Terri,
You have 3 ways to create tickets right now :
- through the admin
- through the frontend submission form
- through emails
I have just performed 2h of tests following your request to verify the email functionnality in WP 3.0. Wasn’t simple, allowed me to correct few side bugs but looks like now it works as for WP 2.9 in previous release.
For your issues :
1/ I am not sure of the specific issue you have faced and if it is fixed in the latest release. It might depend a bit on the email formatting.
2/ Yes with the new release, you can publish pending tickets.
3/ In the admin, ticket saving is broken in WP 3.0 unless you have the very latest release of WATS. So should be ok with the new release.
I can’t guarantee you that the 3 issues you have seen are fixed in the latest release as I am not 100% sure that I have faced these (especially for the first one). Remember that this is GPL and as any GPL code, it comes without any warranty.
The only thing I can offer is to put reasonnable efforts to fix the issues you could encounter assuming these are fixable (sometimes, there is a roadbloack you just can’t workaround because of the way WP is designed or whatever)… I won’t rewrite WP or spend 100 hours to fix something that is too specific or tricky but based on the plugin history, you can see that I have put a lot of efforts to fix issues (more than 50 releases in one year).
If you send me the specific email you have used, I can offer you to make a try with it to see if it works with latest release on WP 3.0.
Cheers,
Olivier
I am having the same problem as Claudia (categories disabled once WAT is installed).
Can you give us a status update on how much you have achieved so that users can know how much we need to donate to reach the goal of 500?
Thank you for the plugin.
We have just reached 50% of the target. So while it is much appreciated, we are still far from it. People who made a donation have received the new release and so far, I haven’t received any complaint about it so I guess it should be working fine with WP 3.0.
Hi,
I just made a donation & sent payment. How can obtain the new release?
Hi CJ,
Thanks for your donation! I have just sent you a mail with your copy of the release.
Thank you Olivier for your hard work. I really appreciate it. Hopefully you can help me use your script if you have a few minutes to answer a few questions.
I don’t understand why tickets appear in « Recent Posts » on my main page. It’s like it’s a blog entry. Is there anyway to disable this?
Also for future versions, please consider having ticket categories associated with specific pop email accounts that way you can do this….
sales @ example.com goes to the SALES category
billing @ example.com goes to the BILLING
I guess like os ticket.
Hi San,
There is an option to define if you want to display tickets along with the posts on the recent posts in the main page or not, just check or uncheck it.
For the feature you are requesting, I have just implemented something similar to this in 3.0. You can associate email adresses with ticket types, priorities and statuses (not categories) so that specific email adresses get a notification when a ticket with the specific details is opened.
Bojour, Olivier:
Having fun setting up WATS — seems you have allot of the stuff I was looking for in place! Great job!
I am however getting an error when I click on the « Frontend side » link in the confirmation e-mail. Here it is:
Catchable fatal error: Object of class WP_Error could not be converted to string in /home/abcd/public_html/wp-includes/formatting.php on line 2225
Did I setup something incorrectly?
Let me know what you think when you get a chance. Thanks!
Hi Judith,
I can’t reproduce this issue. Can you please send me a mail with the access details to your site so that I can troubleshoot? Can you please also forward to me a sample email generating this problem?
Thanks,
Olivier
hi
when i activate your plugin on my wordpres 3.0.1, categories section did not shown on admin sidebar any more! it seems that your plugin fully disabled the categories!!!
please help me
Hi,
You are using a release that isn’t compatible with 3.0.1! Please consider making a donation if you want to get the latest release which is compatible with 3.0.1.
Hi again!
I’m in iran! so i can’t donate to you!! if you have a bank account in iran please send it to me and i will donate!
but i have a blog with thousands of visitors each day! I can offer you a post on this blog!
http://cazisoft.com
Hi,
Sorry but I don’t have any bank account in Iran.
Right now, Paypal is the only option unfortunately…
I might release the plugin later for free or not, I haven’t yet made any decision.
With regards to your proposal of posting on your blog, you are more than welcome to do it but it won’t automatically entitle you to get the new release for free now. But obviously, the most traction the plugin gets, the best it is. If not a lot of people are really interested in talking about it and making some donations, then I will just focus on the ones that made donations and really deserve the plugin…
Hi
I’d like to use your software to set up a help desk on my website where clients have to set up an account and log in to ask a question. Will this software enable me to do this. I’d like to use a model such as the one at this website: https://www.babysleepsite.com/helpdesk/
Where do I make a donation? What is a reasonable donation?
Hi Rebecca,
Yes WATS should allow you to achieve what you are looking for. I am not sure of the software you are refering to on your link but WATS allow to submit tickets and then interact through these. You also have notifications, listing, etc…
For the donation, just click on the donation button in the post. A reasonnable donation is a fair donation based on the number of hours spent to develop this solution (400 hours so far) versus what you can afford to donate. You can also think about the additionnal value this solution will bring to your website. So just donate what you want, as long as it remains fair (1€ isn’t fair if that’s your question
).
hi, what can i do to get wats (wp 3.0) ad hoc? thanks
Hi,
You can make a donation…
Thanks!
Olivier
hi,
just do my donation. wats now?!
Thanks, I have sent you the release!
Hi,
I’m experimenting with your plugin, and just love it so far.
I do have a small problem regarding language. I would like to leave the wordpress back-end (administrator part let’s say) in the default English since I’m maintaining it, but I would like the plugin to be in Turkish since that is the language my customer speaks.
I can have the translations done, but you suggested earlier to set the default language in the wp-config file to Turkish in order for it to work. But that will also change my local interface to Turkish I suppose? Which I of course don’t want.
Is there another way that I can translate and change the plugin language to Turkish and leaving the rest of the Wordpress back-end English? Even by going into the php files?
I will of course thank you by sending you a Turkish localisation file once I’m sure I can do it so my efforts are not for nothing
Kind regards,
Max
Hi Max,
Unfortunately, this can’t easily be achieved. There are two ways :
1/ use a multilinngual plugin. I haven’t tested this and I can’t comment on how it would work with WATS.
2/ perform a partial translation of WATS : translate the frontend sentences to Turkish and then leave the admin sentences in English. This would work for 90% of the sentences except those that are common to frontend and admin for which you’lll have to make a decision. Basically, those which you would translate will appear translated and the other ones will remain in english. You would have to set the wp config to Turkish (and this would probably affect the admin in some way unless you remove the Turkish translation file for admin).
Regards,
Olivier
Hi Olivier,
Thanks a lot for your quick response.
Unfortunately, I’m afraid in this case your nice plugin will not help me satisfy my customer.
I wish you the best of luck for the future and getting those $500 donations so you can keep up the good work.
Kind regards,
Max
Thanks Max, good luck!
Olivier
Hi,
today I installed the latest release 1.0.52 under Wordpress 3.0.1. Great!
Unfortunately I cannot mail to the translator. Is there a complete german translation available?
-merlinuwe
The latest german translation available is the one you have with the plugins. It is a bit outdated since it was made for 1.0.23 I think. So few sentences mightn’t be translated.