Some early screenshots from the frontend:

Edit:
Moved screnshots to the WIKI Documentation

WOW!!! Go Acenes! That looks amazing!

I have an upcoming community intranet project where I was going to use an external help desk. I'd love to give your system a try. Are these mock-ups or from a functioning system?

It looks like, as your notes say, it can be used for a simple forum or a help desk system. I can't wait to try it out.

Hi Ben,

It is largely working allready, but I need to fix several smaller issues I stumbled over while playing with it. Then I will publish a first release and hope to get some help in thorough testing to bring it to productivity quality.

That helptesk-extensions sounds really gorgeous. Can't wait until you release the final version

Amazing, this can be very useful for many peoples

Greetings, darki

The first release of TYPOlight Helpdesk is available in the WIKI for early adopters an brave testers:

http://www.typolight.org/wiki/extensions:helpdesk

Enjoy.

Unbelievable! This is a really great extension. Good work.

Remember when we were trying to decide to go with a third-party forum or an integrated forum? This looks VERY close to what we had envisioned for the integrated forum.

While the helpdesk functionality is AWESOME, I can see this getting some tweaking to be used as a simple forum for those who don't need something as robust as PunBB.

As soon as the wrinkles are ironed out, I vote for this getting included in the core.

Yeah ... I'm with Logan's comments. I'd rather use a slightly less powerful forum that is fully-integrated instead of a third party system that runs independently.

[Ben runs off to install and test the new module.]

Acenes,

I have installed and played around with the system and am very impressed. It looks like you figured out this request for "clickable rows in the admin area" - http://www.typolight.org/forum/topic/778.html. One thing to check is that you don't run into the same issues Leo had here - http://www.typolight.org/forum/message/4796.html

Here are a few comments and suggestions that I have after trying the system out briefly:

Backend
1. You may want to reduce the font size of the desk / forum names to be more in line with the standard TL interface.
2. You may want to use icons that are more similar to the TL admin interface, in size and style. I have e-mailed an icon pack that you may find useful.
3. You may want to use the standard TL "green / grey eye" icon to toggle visibility / published state for forums/tickets/responses.
4. TL already uses GeSHI (/plugins/geshi) so you should be able to use that instead of packaging it again
5. You may want to add an option to categories to set whether it is a helpdesk or a forum - then, a specific language set would be used in the frontend that is tailored, such as "New ticket" versus "New topic".
6. You may want to add an option to categories for 'formatting options'. Possible options might include none, basic and full. All formatting abilities might still be available, but the menu would be as it is now (full), basic (bold, italics, underline, link, img, code, quote) or none. (This setting would apply to front and back end of TL)

Frontend
1. Everything looks great, although you may be interested in using some of the icons from the pack I sent you.
2. E-mail notifications / subscriptions (actually for both front and back end users) will bring this system to a point where it will be highly usable.
3. You may also want to add RSS feed generation to the roadmap, although this isn't as crucial as e-mail notifications.

Great job, Acenes! You've built a excellent module that will get a lot of use!

It would be great to hear what Leo thinks about this. I, for one, am VERY excited.

Hi Ben,

Quote:

TL already uses GeSHI (/plugins/geshi)

For info, TL does not use any more GeSHI, but dp.SyntaxHighlighter (LGPL)

Ah ... thanks for pointing that out, Cyril. I guess I can delete /plugins/geshi from my installations of TL then, right?

EDIT - Logan, I posted your question in a new thread to keep this one on topic.
http://www.typolight.org/forum/topic/2417.html

Yes, Ben you can delete it ... if you have a version >= 2.4.5 of course

Wow, so much rapture about my little extension, thanks people

Quote:

It looks like you figured out this request for "clickable rows in the admin area"

In fact that is no special trick, I'm only putting all elements inside one "a" tag. Another thing was bugging me more there, how to add a title and header row. I used a trick to make that work, but I must yet have overlooked existing options to do it in a cleaner way (still have to learn a lot about TL internals).

Quote:

1. You may want to reduce the font size of the desk / forum names to be more in line with the standard TL interface.
2. You may want to use icons that are more similar to the TL admin interface, in size and style. I have e-mailed an icon pack that you may find useful.
3. You may want to use the standard TL "green / grey eye" icon to toggle visibility / published state for forums/tickets/responses.

Thanks for the hints and the icon set (btw. is it ok to use them for GPL, I couldn't open the Agreement.rtf on my pc?). It seems to me however the standard backend icons are somewhat "lightened up" even against your icon set.

After rethinking, it would be wise to completely separate the styles and icons for frontend and backend. To be more compliant, the backend icons and styles should go into subfolder system/modules/helpdesk/themes/$GLOBALS['TL_CONFIG']['backendTheme'], right?

Quote:

4. TL already uses GeSHI (/plugins/geshi) so you should be able to use that instead of packaging it again

As pointed out by cyril it was removed with 2.4.6 after I already had started to use it in my code. I might give
dp.SyntaxHighlighter a try, if I can rely it being still available in the standard plugins for a few releases

Quote:

5. You may want to add an option to categories to set whether it is a helpdesk or a forum - then, a specific language set would be used in the frontend that is tailored, such as "New ticket" versus "New topic".

Also thought about such a option. But I think it would be even better to rename the exiting types to "private support", "shared support" and "public support", and then add 2 new category types as "restricted forum" (which can only be seen by members), and "public forum". That way not only the wording can be different, but also the functions. For example in "support" categories the ticket owner could close the ticket, while in "forum" categories only a "moderator" could do that.

Quote:

6. You may want to add an option to categories for 'formatting options'. Possible options might include none, basic and full. All formatting abilities might still be available, but the menu would be as it is now (full), basic (bold, italics, underline, link, img, code, quote) or none. (This setting would apply to front and back end of TL)

An option to configure the button toolbars on a per-category base seems reasonable, I'll add that to the roadmap.

Quote:

3. You may also want to add RSS feed generation to the roadmap, although this isn't as crucial as e-mail notifications.

Granted.

Thanks for the constructive feedback!

Version 0.2.0 (2007-09-16)
--------------------------
- Made backend recognize theme setting:
- css and icons are now at system/modules/helpdesk/themes
!IMPORTANT: adjust your frontend template accordingly
- Fallback on icons to gif when no png found
- Fallback on files to default theme when not found in custom theme
- Added deep authorization checks to backend module
- Fixed error messages when no client or supporter groups defined
- Added category parameter for images directory, to enable custom icons.
(Fallback: Images no found there will be taken from the default images directory)
- GeSHi: fixed line numbering issue and switched to css mode
- Wide code and pre blocks are now displayed in a scrollbox to no longer mess up
the layout
- Several appearence tweaks (templates, icons, styles)
- Replaced the smiley set