osTicket/osTicket v1.10-dpr

v1.10 Developer Preview

on GitHub

Major New Features

Internationalization, Phase III

Phase III of the internationalization project is the next major advancement of osTicket language support. The greatest improvement is that all administratively customizable content. While this is a great last mile for many multilingual support teams, we've also revisited the client interface main pages as well as the knowledge base on both the client and staff panels.

• Elect primary and secondary languages
  • Any language can be the primary, any number of languages can be secondary
  • English-US can be disabled
  • Order of secondary languages is sortable and controls flag order
• All content is translatable to secondary languages
  • Help Topics
    • Alphabetic sorting happens after translation
  • SLA Plans
  • Departments
  • Custom Forms (and all configurations such as placeholders)
  • Custom Lists
    • Items
    • Properties and configurations
  • Site Pages
  • FAQ Categories
  • FAQ Articles
    • Common attachments (available for all translations)
    • Per-language attachments
  • Content such as welcome emails and password-reset emails
• Olson timezones are used instead of GMT offset
  • Auto-detect support for agent and client timezone
• Time and date formats can be automatic by locale preference now.
  • Locale preference is the default
  • Locale preference with forced 24-hour time is also an option
  • Advanced format is also possible using the intl library and sprintf as a backup
  • Formats including the day of the week are localized
  • Chinese and Arabic formats using alternate day, month, and year digits and separators are now automatic.
• Client portal has HTML headers indicate search engine links to pages of other languages, as well as the Content-Header HTTP header to indicate the intended audience
• Spell check in text boxes, textareas and rich text editors should respect the language of the content being edited

Tasks

Tasks are sub-tickets which can be created and attached to tickets as well as created separately. Tasks have their own assignees, department routing and visibility, due date, and custom data. Tasks have their own threads and can have a list of collaborators. All in all, tasks may very well be the greatest advancement of osTicket since the advent of the ticket itself.

New Advanced Search

The advanced search feature is rewritten to address several shortcomings of the original feature as well as a host of new features including

• Search by any field, built-in or custom
• Save your searches
• Advanced search is shown as a new queue
• Current advanced search criteria is maintained between searches
• Sorting options are relevant to queue and preference remains after navigation between queues

Minor New Features

Thread editing

Thread items can now be edited. The original entries are preserved and are accessible via a thread item's "History". Items can be resent with or without editing them, and a signature selection is available when resending.

Roles, and custom extended access

The group permissions component has been offloaded to a new component, named "Roles". Roles allow for naming a set of permissions. Agents now have a "Primary Role" which defines their access to global things like the user directory and their access for their primary department. Each department granted via "Groups" is allows to be linked to a distinct "Role". This allows granting Read-Only access to some departments, for instance.

Improved knowledge base interface

• "Featured" articles show on the front page
• Knowledge base search on front page
• Translatable content
• Locale-specific attachments

Multiple forms and disable individual fields for Help Topics

Help Topic configuration has a new super feature. Multiple forms can now be associated with each help topic, and the order the forms should appear for new tickets and editing tickets is configurable. Previously, the custom forms were always rendered above the "Ticket Details" form; but now it's completely customizable. What's more is that individual fields including the issue details can be disabled for any help topic.

Department hierarchy

Departments are now nestable. All departments can have a parent department, and the hierarchy is arbitrarily nestable. Access is cascaded so that access to a parent department automatically extends access to all descendent departments.

Image annotation

Images can be annotated to add simple shapes like ovals, boxes, arrows and text. Annotates can be committed, and a new image is created from the annotations; however, annotations can still be edited before the thread post is submitted. Annotations are supported for both clients and agents, and the images can be selected from the ticket thread, so images already posted can be easily marked up.

Variable context type-ahead

When editing content which uses variables, such as a thank-you page or an email template, variable placeholders now use a type-ahead feature. This new pop out significantly improves the connection between which variables are available in which templates. It also allows for adding significantly to the variable library without relying on exhaustive documentation to convey this information. Some new variables include

• User lists, such as department members, team members, and collaborator lists
• Lists can be rendered as names, emails, or both
• Dates are format-able to time, short, full, and long
• Dates can be humanized to something like in about an hour
• Dates can be auto localized and formatted to the recipients locale and time zone selection
• Attachments to thread items and custom fields can be attached via variable (e.g. %{message.files})

Redesigned list management

The list management feature has a significant overhaul to accommodate larger lists. It also provides a heads display of list item properties as well as AJAX updates. CSV import and pagination have also been added as well as mass enable, disable, and delete.

Pluggable filter actions

Filter actions are now far more flexible allowing for more elaborate and creative filter actions to be created. A new filter action has been added as an example of future possibilities: send an email. The new feature allows for ticket filter actions to be defined without modification to internal table structures, and even allows actions to be created via plugins!

Actions are also sortable and performed in the order specified, which allows doing something like sending an email before rejecting the ticket.

Other Improvements

Custom Data

• Fields have more granular access configuration. View, edit, and requirement can be enabled individually for both agents and end users
• Fields can be marked for required for closed. Therefore they can inhibit closure of a ticket without a valid value.

Export

The agent's locale is considered when exporting CSV and semicolon separators are used where necessary

User Interface

The subject line and many other text fields around the system are truncated by the browser, which fixes early truncation for some language with long Unicode byte stream, such as Chinese.

Improved lock system

The ticket lock system uses a code now which is rotated when updates to tickets are submitted. This helps prevent unwanted extra posts to tickets. A new annoying popup is displayed when viewing the ticket and the lock is about to expire.

Draft system

The draft system has been rewritten to reduce the number of requests to the backend and to reduce the dreaded "Unable to save draft" popup

ORM

The database query system is being redesigned to use an object relational mapper (ORM) instead of SQL queries. This will eventually lead to fewer database queries to use the system, cleaner code, and will allow the use of database engines other than MySQL. The ORM was originally introduced in osTicket v1.8.0, but has seen the greatest boost in capability in this release. About 47% of the SQL queries are removed between v1.9.7 and v1.10