Plugin Development: Technical Support for WordPress

So, you’re a freelancer and you make WordPress powered websites for your clients, cool. Now how many times have you experienced them calling, emailing, texting, tweeting you asking for a core upgrade, plugin upgrade, theme fix or whatever? Well I’ve been experiencing that quite a lot, and that’s a reason to charge an extra monthly fee for support. And with this plugin …

Yeah, with this plugin you’ll get rid of the annoying phonecalls and tweets. Technical Support for WordPress (formely called Bug Reporting for WordPress) adds a dashboard widget to the WordPress admin panel, where your clients could file a support ticket in only a few clicks! Pick a topic, write a title, describe the issue, send. Voila! You will receive the filed report by e-mail, well formatted and with all the necessary details. You can then take action, and finally reply to the e-mail when everything’s done.

This is one side of it. The second side is that the plugin is totally customizable, the subject and message format are powered by short tags, the topic list is customizable, and of course the company (provider) name and email address. This means that you can include a certain tag, keyword or whatever to the subject line, say “#CompanyName” then filter that in Gmail or whatever, and make different clients go to different folders. There, no more junk in your Inbox!

Okay there’s a second side, this means that there should be a third. What about branding? The plugin permits you to have a provider name, provider URL and a provider logo! Which will be displayed in your clients’ dashboards and will link directly to your website. That way, your clients will keep you in mind, 24/7! Ok, kidding, but it’s really good for branding..

Now, I know you already want this and can’t wait to download it, but hey, the request hasn’t been approved by the WordPress.org Plugin Directory yet, so as soon as it does, we’ll go live. Meanwhile take a look at these screenshots:

Looking forward to your comments, feature requests, etc ;)

About the author

Konstantin Kovshenin

WordPress Core Contributor, ex-Automattician, public speaker and consultant, enjoying life in Moscow. I blog about tech, WordPress and DevOps.

10 comments

  • Просто я русскую локализацию уже сделал. Сейчас пишу пост на своем блоге ( пока черновик ). Если не против, конечно. Локализованный плагин могу отправить тебе, если кинешь мыло. Мое – через сайт под катом.

  • Будет существовать 2 перевода. Проблемы нет, плагин ты выпустил под GNU General Public License. В посте укажу, что в версии 0.2 – будет авторская версия на русском. За плагин спасибо, давно искал.

  • I was looking at this WP technical-support plugin and I had a thought it could be also used as site's PM system because of the settings available so I might test it.