Helpdesk extension tutorial

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Author	Message
Sebastian Schoeller	Thursday 21 July 2011 5:25:05 am Hi all, I am volunteering for a mid-sized NGO called Engineers Without Borders Germany. We are looking to organize our volunteer IT support. In order to do so we would like to install a helpdesk system, whereby somebody can post a ticket, that is assigned to an existing or external user. After having resolved the problem the ticket may be closed. Notification should be done via Email. We are using eZPublish as our CMS for some time based on ezwebin standard. We do not dispose over much expertise on customizing extensions and so forth and we do not have a budget to pay for that. In order to avoid installing other open-source tools to do this job, I ask you as the community whether somebody has done this based on eZPublish already and whether this somebody is willing to share/generated a step-by-step tutorial on how to realize that. Thanks for the attention and best wishes Sebastian
Sandra Parente	Thursday 21 July 2011 8:38:33 am I think this could be a good start: http://projects.ez.no/ticketsystem I've never tested it, so I don't know if it could be successfully modified for the 4.x series... Sandra Parente www.netbliss.it
Steven E. Bailey	Friday 22 July 2011 3:04:38 am I was planning on building a customer portal/ticket system for my own business. If there were a financial incentive I'd make it a priority... Certified eZPublish developer http://ez.no/certification/verify/396111 Available for ezpublish troubleshooting, hosting and custom extension development: http://www.leidentech.com
Sebastian Schoeller	Friday 22 July 2011 12:09:10 pm @Steven: unfortunately we do not have funds for software development. Thanks for the offer @Sandra: thanks for the hint. I checked out the trunk and started fumbling around with it adapted some overwrite template settings changed $view_parameters.xyz to is_set($view_parameters.xyz) assembled the class definitions since the class definition package would not install I can now generate a ticketsystem object and view that within the admin view. I thus though receive the following error: Unknown template variable 'ui_context' in namespace '' I cannot find any solution for this one. Does anyone know whether some environment variable needs to be passed within the template structure? Any hints are very welcome. Best wishes Sebastian
Steven E. Bailey	Saturday 23 July 2011 4:48:01 am Understandable, if and when I ever get around to doing it I'll probably put it up on projects. Is the ui_context error actually causing problems? Certified eZPublish developer http://ez.no/certification/verify/396111 Available for ezpublish troubleshooting, hosting and custom extension development: http://www.leidentech.com
Gaetano Giunta	Saturday 23 July 2011 5:33:48 am I also have had the idea of such a project in the backburner for a long time, my goal being to create a drop-in replacement for issues.ez.no... Sadly I think I will never have enough time to implement it. Here are my development notes (brain dump): Content classes: . issue - id (int, autogenerated) - name - type (bug, fr, security bug, taks) Note: sec. issue have different perms! - severity - status (obj state?) - relations (different obj relations attributes ?) - affects ( obj relation / eztags / multiselect ?) - fixed in ( obj relation / eztags / multiselect ?) - description: rich text - attachment (needs one or more => use children objs?) - component(s) (eztags ?) . issue_comment - rich text - attachment Workflow events: . change state to sec. issues upon creation to make them invisible ? . update issue last modif. date upon adding a comment (for proper sorting) Misc issues: . shall we keep whole history of issues, as we do now? . relation between issues: make sure it can be easily traversed both ways Principal Consultant International Business Member of the Community Project Board
Steven E. Bailey	Saturday 23 July 2011 8:34:54 am I don't want to hijack Sebastian's thread here... but I was thinking more along the lines for business purposes, which is why I don't see anything out there that is good enough. So start with an issue object - each issue is related to a customer group that can have multiple users, each customer group is related to a contract object they are under at the time. All the fields of the issue that can be are related objects (severity, status, request type, affects) etc. That way they can be easily added to. Related objects for related issues. Then of course the xml block for the description and the date fields opened, closed. All other interaction can be a sort of comment class which would be a child of the issue but with the abilty to upload files too... a couple of extras could be sms notification on the highest priority issues and wrap everything up with http://dhtmlx.com/docs/products/dhtmlxGantt/index.shtml Now if anyone has this or wants this... let me know. Certified eZPublish developer http://ez.no/certification/verify/396111 Available for ezpublish troubleshooting, hosting and custom extension development: http://www.leidentech.com
Sandra Parente	Saturday 23 July 2011 9:46:35 am @Sebastian: I don't know if this may help you, but in this article http://share.ez.no/learn/ez-publish/creating-custom-admin-modules-views David Linnard explains very well the basic differences in templating between versions <= 4.2 and versions 4.3 and onward. Sandra Parente www.netbliss.it
Sebastian Schoeller	Saturday 23 July 2011 1:42:47 pm @Sandra: thanks for the hint. I started reassembling the extension according to the tutorial. Unfortunately just changing for $tpl = eZTemplate::factory(); Does not work. I'll keep on trying.
Sandra Parente	Monday 25 July 2011 10:05:47 am @Sebastian: a couple of small hints: http://doc.ez.no/eZ-Publish/Technical-manual/4.x/Reference/Configuration-files/menu.ini/Topmenu_dashboard/Enabled/ http://doc.ez.no/eZ-Publish/Technical-manual/4.x/Reference/Configuration-files/menu.ini/Topmenu_users/Shown/ Sandra Parente www.netbliss.it