Support Tickets - building a new one using only Pages

While working on the components for the new About Me section, I realized that I needed a proper way for people to communicate with me. After considering the options for a while, I decided to build my own ticket system. This is fairly easy and I could have done things in several ways, but decided to use some tricks from my Task Manager to make it a little more dynamic.

 

 

In essence, this is just a database where I have defined the setup so that you only see your own entries. As the owner, I of course see all entries, which makes it easy to work with. I have added a few fields to help sort things using filters. These fields include Status of course, type of request as this setup does not include any categories, Priority for escalation and SLA, which is just a date field I can set for due date that is then calculated to show time to completion.

I also have a field for Assignee, even though it is a bit of an overkill for my purposes. I have added it thought for others to use that have more than one person managing the tickets.

Database fields and Templates

While working on this new set of templates, I realized that I probably should add some variables for dealing with the field numbers. In most cases you use template names, so it's fairly easy to manage, but in the case of adding the ability to update fields in the frontend we use field ID's instead. Since everyone has a different ID sequence, this can be a bit annoying to work with, so I am thinking I will add variables instead at the beginning of the templates. This way they will work just like CSS, so you can change one variable and it will update across the template.

Easy creation

This setup is nothing fancy and it is just a first iteration. I will probably build more on it as I see the need for it, but for now it will suit my need. All in all, it took about a week to complete, but that was mostly because I did not have much time to commit to it. I will still do a new form for this one, but other than that I think this one is done. It is nice because I only needed to customize two templates and the form, instead of all five templates.

Tasks integrations

I have a field for database relations that I will add later. Not that I think I will actually need it, but more because I want to write a guide on how to do it and also so I can use it if I want. I also want to make sure that if someone else wants to use both together, they have a way to do it out of the box.

Onwards with About Me

With this, I now only have to figure out how I want to set up the History part about me. I have some ideas for it that include setting up a database where each category will become a full width component, or just use blocks for it. I'll ponder on it some more in the coming weeks to see where I might land on that.

Always moving forward