Plugin Review: Technical Support

It’s become evident that a large portion of the WPTavern readership is made up of consultants. This next plugin should be right up their alley. It’s called Technical Support and is authored by Konstantin Kovshenin. The plugin provides a dashboard widget that after configuration, gives clients an easy way to contact you for support. After install and activation, you’ll need to configure a couple of fields such as provider name, provider email address (this is where the support queries will go), provider logo and provider URL.

The next step is to customize the technical support widget. From here, you can add or delete topics such as General Support, etc. You can also customize the default E-Mail Subject line which is nice since you can then add that subject line to a filter within your favorite e-mail client. Last but not least is the configuration of the message format. You can reword the default text while also rearranging the shortcodes available.

After I saved the configuration, I added the widget to my dashboard.

The email I received provided all of the necessary information I configured. Worked just as expected. Note that if the site this is installed on can not send email, neither can the plugin. As for the other side of the equation, I don’t know how to respond back to the ticket author. Therefor, this is not a good means of two way communication. However, this is a great way to notify the person in charge of issues that have sprung up such as an error.

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2 responses to “Plugin Review: Technical Support”

  1. This seems useful for certain people, but users only have access if they’re signed up on your blog?

    I would love to see this extended to offer a complete support ticket system. A frontend widget and a way for the admin to respond from the Dashboard or email, as well as for users to track their support tickets. I know, I know…I’m suggesting a lot:)

    To date, I’ve been using osTicket for my support ticket system. I would love to see a WP integrated support ticket system.

    EDIT: Looks like there are few, this seems to be the most recently updated:
    http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wats/

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