A Help Desk App Built On WordPress?

Written by Mark Forrester on July 6, 2011 Product News.

So much goodness.

It’s been only just over a month since Jay and Mike released FaultPress – an advanced bug tracking application theme, but they didn’t just stop there, they went straight back to the drawing board, read all our community’s recommendations and suggestions and started developing a new, more general usage support theme catering for a wider range of niches. We are proud to release that theme today – introducing SupportPress.

SupportPress, our second application style theme is designed to create a clean and simple, yet powerful help desk using WordPress core functionality. Customers can submit support requests, but are encouraged to check an intuitive knowledgebase to learn if their issues have already been resolved. Agents (your staff) administrate tickets by setting priorities and delegating tasks to fellow team members.

The solution is perfect for web designers, hosting companies, app developers, training academies, to name but a few examples. It takes WordPress as a content management system and turns it into a basic customer relationship management system.

Once again Jay has worked his magic with the intuitively laid out responsive CSS3 design, tested on iPhones, iPads, and MacBook Pros set at various resolutions, not to forget all the uglier web browsers (you know which ones we’re talking about), whilst Mike has done an astounding job in building a stable help desk on top of the WordPress core framework, keeping the code clean and bloat free.

Another responsive beauty coded by Jay Koster.

The knowledgebase can house commonly asked questions, and the feature I really like is that you can even convert a support ticket to a knowledgebase article at the click of a button if you are an administrator. You can also easily set your latest blog post as an alert if, for example you are a host company experiencing downtime – this will appear at the top of your homepage for all site visitors.

You can also make your whole site private, accessible only by registered members of the help desk, this is set in the SupportPress theme options.

Adding a ticket with SupportPress

In SupportPress you can even communicate with your agents and manage private information with messages. Think of messages like a blog, but one which is only accessible by your own team. Nifty.

A ticket, with the ability to ‘watch’ it to receive further communication on this support query.

Deciding what to screenshot and preview in this blog post has been difficult, as there is so much functionality packed into this theme that deserves highlighting. I haven’t even touched on the professionally styled email messages agents and customers receive.

The best way to get an understanding of what is achievable with this theme is to view the demo, read more about the functionality if offers on the theme listing page, and even test it out on the theme playground.

As an administrator converting a support ticket to a knowledgebase article is easy. Take note of the sexy, animated CSS3 buttons.

Competition Time (Again)!

As with Editorial’s release last week, we’d like to give you the opportunity to win a lifetime Developer Subscription to the WooThemes club by simply sharing the news about SupportPress’s release and telling us what you think of this new functionality in the comments below.

Use the coupon code “SUPPORTPRESS11” to get 11% discount on your purchase of SupportPress (valid until 11 July). Come on, we know you want to… 🙂
cta-banner-10-product-page-v2_2x

74 Responses

  1. Matthew Guay
    July 6, 2011 at 11:55 am #

    This looks awesome, and I can’t wait to try it out. Are support tickets private by default? For example, if someone sends in a new support request, will that be private for us to answer in WordPress, or will it be a public question by default? Also, can tickets be emailed into SupportPress? For example, can you setup all emails to support@mysite.com to be imported as new support tickets? If so, I’m ready to switch 🙂

    Beautiful design, too! Great work, WooTeam!

    • Jay
      July 6, 2011 at 12:03 pm #

      Tickets are private by default 🙂

      Setting up the email to ticket system is possible but reliant on parameters on your server being met. Plus it’s tricky to develop.

      We’ll be adding it as a feature if demand is great enough.

      • James O'Sullivan
        July 6, 2011 at 1:24 pm #

        Hey Jay, the creating a ticket from an email would be a killer feature. For me its critical really as users simply reply most of the time to support@website.com and it would be nice to generate a ticket from this. Will be looking out for this feature in a coming release. cheers

      • Matthew Guay
        July 6, 2011 at 3:44 pm #

        Awesome, thanks for the info! Email import would be crucial for full adoption of SupportPress for me, though, as James said. I wonder: since you can post to WordPress via email, could that be changed to make new tickets with that address? If so, you could forward all new emails sent to support@yoursite.com to, say, ticket@yoursite.com which would be the address for WordPress import. Just a thought.

        Either way, if email support can be added, I’m certain I’ll have many clients interested in it!

      • Dustyn Gobler
        July 8, 2011 at 3:06 am #

        Ticket creation via email would make this a “must have” theme.

  2. munyah
    July 6, 2011 at 12:03 pm #

    Really enjoying the way you guys are totally leveraging WP to come up with mini-applications that you just call ‘themes’.

    Loving it…Keep it up

  3. karan
    July 6, 2011 at 12:13 pm #

    Awesome theme functionality.
    Looking forward to try it.

  4. Rahul Sharma
    July 6, 2011 at 12:22 pm #

    WOW…. awesome theme…
    I was just searching for a similar thing… for one of my projects 🙂

  5. Suren H
    July 6, 2011 at 12:30 pm #

    “SupportPress you can even communicate with your agents and manage private information with messages.”

    It is really excellent and the Tickets, Alerts and Custom email notifications are great.

    Good Job! 🙂

  6. Tohir
    July 6, 2011 at 12:45 pm #

    Really love the customized display for different platforms

  7. Rex Stevens
    July 6, 2011 at 12:47 pm #

    Been a huge fan of WooThemes from the get-go but these new specialty themes are amazing. I’ve been looking for a support app for our web design business so i was super excited to see this. I’m installing it as we speak…

    • Ryan Ray
      July 6, 2011 at 5:53 pm #

      Be sure to let us know what you think, anxious to hear. 🙂

  8. Mark Casey
    July 6, 2011 at 12:50 pm #

    This looks great.

    I think the demo link needs updating at the end of your post.

    • karan
      July 6, 2011 at 1:11 pm #

      On the supportpress theme page the add to knowledgebase and code features larger images are not opening

      • Mark Forrester
        July 6, 2011 at 1:40 pm #

        Thanks Karan. Should be fixed now.

  9. Achim Kirchmann
    July 6, 2011 at 12:50 pm #

    Wow, this looks really cool !

    I would like to second the idea to integrate a mail to ticket feature. This would be the killer !!

    • James O'Sullivan
      July 6, 2011 at 1:25 pm #

      +1

    • mike
      July 6, 2011 at 4:14 pm #

      +1

    • Mark Bailey
      July 6, 2011 at 5:16 pm #

      +1

      • Gavin Botica
        July 7, 2011 at 1:16 pm #

        +1

    • Alex Grishin
      July 7, 2011 at 10:25 pm #

      +1

      Can’t wait this features!

      With ticket email creation feature I can switch from Zendesk to SupportPress 🙂

  10. James O'Sullivan
    July 6, 2011 at 1:38 pm #

    I notice that a new ticket has a number of fields like Ticket Title, Type and Priority, is there a way to add some more fields? In order to make this usable for say a property website – I was hoping to have property address as one of the fields? Or property ID and then be able to search tickets by this field? This is just one example of how to make this theme have a more generic appeal. Maybe custom form builder? Looks great.

  11. Drew Register
    July 6, 2011 at 2:48 pm #

    One thing not mentioned is the ability for users to create profiles, bios, and pics. That’s an interesting and well-designed feature.

  12. Scott Webb
    July 6, 2011 at 2:48 pm #

    This looks outstanding! I’ve been having trouble with customizing FaultPress in a generic way. SupportPress has a few things that may work for me. I’m trying to figure out if a gated Knowledge Base is more benefitial than an open knowledge base.

    I’m trying to make my photography business website and set up much more than what many photographers would ever do. There’s always so much that confuses people about photography sessions and I want to make so I’m helping to educate along the way. My plan was to just uses simple pages to write content and link to it on an FAQ or Knowledge page. Would you see a benefit to using SupportPress over that idea? Eventually, I want to offer Wedding Websites to clients as well and I can see SupportPress being more helpful in that case.

    I’d love to hear what you think.

    • Ryan Ray
      July 6, 2011 at 5:58 pm #

      I’d venture to say that you’d almost want an open forum with a support forum, if and when you started doing wedding websites.

      The open forum can be for general knowledge that people can share with each other as well as your articles. Then a more closed support forum that your customers can use for their wedding sites.

      Using SupportPress you could potentially have an open knowledge base, with support tickets. You’d still miss out on a forum feel though. Interesting ideas. 🙂

  13. kaambiz
    July 6, 2011 at 2:58 pm #

    Well all I can say (and it’s not this theme specific) is I wish your themes had built-in RTL support (meaning appropriate styling) because it’s a little hard to do it every single time. Beside that? it is perfect.

  14. Kate Mag
    July 6, 2011 at 2:59 pm #

    Damn! that’s beautiful! 🙂

  15. Jared
    July 6, 2011 at 3:23 pm #

    I just recently bought FaultPress and I’ve been loving every minute of using it. Add to that a theme like SupportPress and i’m in ticket writing support giving heaven!

  16. SocialSnapIn
    July 6, 2011 at 3:30 pm #

    This looks cool, will you be using it for your own support? That would guarantee this would be continually improved and developed 🙂

  17. Ostheimer Webdesign
    July 6, 2011 at 4:29 pm #

    Hi,

    looks great – can the theme (and all text including the ones sent by email) be localized with po/mo?

    Br,
    Andreas

  18. Kiran
    July 6, 2011 at 4:47 pm #

    Absolutely perfect theme for support area. Very nice and slick design. Looking forward to try on our site.

  19. nichs
    July 6, 2011 at 5:00 pm #

    this looks great, jam packed full of goodness. very much looking forward to using

  20. Eric
    July 6, 2011 at 5:16 pm #

    Integration with bbPress would complete this solution! With this addition, I believe this would be a wonderful support solution for Open Source projects…

    • Mark Bailey
      July 6, 2011 at 5:19 pm #

      +1 on forum integration. Of course, even without forum support built into the theme itself, it would be quite easy to embed Vanilla Forum or others. However users would have to sign in twice.

      SupportPress is great! Congratulations to the entire WooThemes team for raising the bar on innovation.

    • WP for church
      July 7, 2011 at 12:05 am #

      +500 on Bbpress styling being built in!

  21. David
    July 6, 2011 at 5:48 pm #

    Love the look and feel of this and can see it could be a good addition rather than just using a FAQ page. How easy is it to get working across different sites in a multisite install – e.g. could you have users registered at the main site http://www.example.com automatically registered with their same username/password in support.example.com powered by the Supportbase theme?

    • Mark Bailey
      July 6, 2011 at 7:16 pm #

      +1 for this.

  22. Andrew
    July 6, 2011 at 5:53 pm #

    This is a great theme now I have plans to modify this help desk to become a CRM of sorts with gravityforms 🙂

  23. Matt
    July 6, 2011 at 6:39 pm #

    There is already a product called SupportPress, it’s open source and actually what’s used for support by the Akismet and VaultPress teams. It’s not a theme but uses BackPress.

    • Mark
      July 6, 2011 at 7:15 pm #

      Hey Matt,

      Thanks for popping by. Apologies about the name conflict. I’m just trying to read up on the product, but can’t find much information, apart from it being listed as a “not public” project using BackPress – http://backpress.org/projects-using-backpress/

      I’ll chat with the team and see what we can do given the circumstance. Can you confirm, given it’s a private project, if we should change the name of our theme?

  24. Mark Bailey
    July 6, 2011 at 7:26 pm #

    I’d love to see nested Knowledgebase categories. For example, if I set up parent/child categories like this:

    WordPress Hosting
    – Getting Started
    – Themes
    – Plugins
    cPanel Hosting
    – Getting Started
    – E-mail
    – FTP

    They show up in the Knowledgebase Categories list without a heirarchy. It would be great to have them listed in a categoy/subcategory format.

  25. Zulo
    July 6, 2011 at 7:59 pm #

    This theme/app is awesome! Can’t wait to try it on some of my projects…

  26. Marius Masalar
    July 6, 2011 at 7:59 pm #

    Ahhhh see this is the kind of thing I look forward to! I really hope you guys keep building this kind of WordPress “application” type theme that really pushes the boundaries of what the platform can do.

    I’d just like to add my voice to the crowd asking for email support integration, bbPress integration, the user integration that David suggested, and the nested categories that Mark mentioned above!

  27. Rob
    July 6, 2011 at 8:11 pm #

    Nice touch to have it working well on mobile devices.

  28. Rick Adlam
    July 7, 2011 at 12:03 am #

    At last!
    This application points the way the web has been moving for the past 4 years. The eyeballs are moving to the mobile phone for information.
    I have to use plugins currently to get my sites to be readable on mobiles.
    This theme jumps out of that paradigm.
    Whist I don’t need a support ticket function, Everybody needs the mobile phone read-abilty that this theme offers. Brilliant.
    Suggest that all themes need this functionality.

  29. Croata
    July 7, 2011 at 1:08 am #

    Always with wonderful themes, this in itself is done by one of the WooThemes great, congratulations for the work.

    And apply for a signature, is still more wonderful

  30. John Sundberg
    July 7, 2011 at 3:26 am #

    Like many, I’ve been waiting and looking forward to a theme/app like this.

    Question though, what do I need to do to see the tickets on the demo site?

  31. Steve Robillard
    July 7, 2011 at 4:12 am #

    I am very excited to try this it would make having one for each partner/client much easier.

  32. Impressed2
    July 7, 2011 at 5:28 am #

    I’m really impressed with this SupportPress web application theme. Include email support/integration and this may become a huge reason for many to join the theme club.

    Is there a built in way to add or remove fields?

  33. Melodie Laylor
    July 7, 2011 at 6:32 am #

    This looks really promising! This might be something my husband could use to process help requests from his clients in his computer repair and consulting business. I might be able to use it with my current website and webhosting clients.

    When are you going to add this to the playground?

  34. Matt Stigall
    July 7, 2011 at 7:00 pm #

    Very nice Niche theme with awesome functionality! Can’t wait to play around with it.

  35. Skyrocket Websites
    July 7, 2011 at 7:36 pm #

    Christmas in July! I can’t wait to try this out.

  36. Dustyn Gobler
    July 8, 2011 at 3:10 am #

    Is it possible to export stats? Like who’s been submitting the most tickets? Who’s been closing the most tickets? How many tickets of a certain type have been submitted? etc etc …

  37. TutsPress
    July 8, 2011 at 4:48 am #

    Glad see here any Support – Ticketing system WordPress theme. WordPress is a not blog now! We are going to professional businesses!

  38. Austin
    July 8, 2011 at 4:40 pm #

    Good stuff – this will be a lot more useful to me than faultpress. Thanks!

  39. Shiri
    July 9, 2011 at 1:17 am #

    This looks great! Can it be used to let users only view their own tickets?

    • Jay
      July 9, 2011 at 1:19 am #

      That’s how it’s setup by default, so yes! 🙂

  40. Leon
    July 9, 2011 at 5:05 am #

    I love this support press theme. I excited with knowledge base feature. It really save me a lot of time if I using it. Thanks

  41. Steve Dimmick
    July 9, 2011 at 8:01 pm #

    Awesome Guys!
    My clients often struggle with overly complex support and ticket systems and this is the solution I’ve been looking for!
    Now I can just add a “support” sub-domain for my client’s projects and away they go.

    Email ticket creation would make it even better!

  42. Karen Dimmick
    July 9, 2011 at 8:26 pm #

    Happy Birthday 🙂

    Nice new theme – that’s going to make life a lot easier for people wanting a support system! Once again, you guys rock – thank you!!

  43. Courtney
    July 10, 2011 at 2:35 am #

    Wow – SupportPress looks like an awesome theme with great functionality. I agree with others that email ticket creation would be a much needed feature but not a deal breaker for me. I have yet to find a support app that I like and I love the idea of keeping in WordPress.

  44. WebsiteHall
    July 12, 2011 at 4:59 am #

    This is the most elegant ticketing system I ever seen. Adding ticket submission through email piping will complete the awesomeness 🙂

  45. flexy
    July 12, 2011 at 8:51 am #

    Thnks! If make to do list, planner(y,m,w) and crm – that will be a best thing for me, because i start project 7effects.net for effictive work online!

  46. Riaan
    July 18, 2011 at 11:55 am #

    Please would you guys consider bringing out a Business Directory theme – Appthemes have been dragging their heels with “Vantage” and f’ing their customers around for more than a year now, with piss-poor release dates. At least with Woothemes, things get done… with excellence.

    • Jay
      July 20, 2011 at 1:00 am #

      We’re planning on an ideasboard theme next. Perhaps look at a business directory theme in the future but tbh, we don’t really want to step on others toes!

  47. Scott Harris
    August 11, 2011 at 4:04 pm #

    This looks awesome guys, but what about a knowledge base theme to help with self service? We’re looking to implement a knowledge base for university students so they can get the answers to their own questions without having to call in / visit…

  48. Scott Harris
    August 11, 2011 at 4:09 pm #

    PS – the search function in the knowledge base doesn’t work well… If I type “How do I modify the layout?” in the search, nothing comes up even though one of the articles is “modify the layout”… the search function should search for any words in the search field regardless of order…

    • Ryan Ray
      September 2, 2011 at 9:00 pm #

      Sorry about that, will pass a message along. 🙂

  49. Joe
    September 2, 2011 at 5:05 pm #

    We are a small PC Support/Tech company, we want to create a help desk support system for dispatching and scheduling. I saw your website and was encouraged to look there by the owner of the company, we were impressed. My question is: can your software what I said above, track calls, schedule calls, my noted of resolution of calls, keep track of customers, addresses, phone numbers etc. This would have a dashboard with calls and time frames and dates? Let me know, we are very interested if this software is capable of this. Hope to hear from you.

    Respectfully Joe Vieira

  50. Joe
    September 2, 2011 at 5:40 pm #

    We are a small PC Support/Tech company, we want to create a help desk support system for dispatching and scheduling. I saw your website and was encouraged to look there by the owner of the company, we were impressed. My question is: can your software what I said above, track calls, schedule calls, my noted of resolution of calls, keep track of customers, addresses, phone numbers etc. This would have a dashboard with calls and time frames and dates? Let me know, we are very interested if this software is capable of this. Hope to hear from you. Sent again, sent wrong e-mail address, sorry

    Respectfully Joe Vieira

    • Ryan Ray
      September 2, 2011 at 9:02 pm #

      Joe,

      it unfortunately isn’t capable of doing what you’ve outlined at the moment. You can always post the idea to WooIdeas and we’ll consider it based on feedback. – http://ideas.woocommerce.com/

Trackbacks/Pingbacks

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