Getting started

1Install the plugin

Go to Plugins → Add New, search for JS Help Desk, install and activate. On activation the plugin creates its tables and a set of sensible defaults, so there is nothing to run by hand.

You need WordPress 5.5 or newer and PHP 7.4 or newer. Full requirements.

2Put the portal on a page

Create a page — most desks call it Support — and add the portal to it in whichever way suits you:

• Block: open the inserter, find the JS Help Desk category, and add the portal block.
• Shortcode: paste [jssupportticket] into the page.

Both render the same thing: the ticket form, the customer’s ticket list, and the ticket view. Blocks render fresh on each request rather than being saved into the post, so a ticket list is never somebody’s queue as it looked the day the page was edited.

Publish the page and add it to your menu.

3Create your departments

A department is how the desk splits its queue: every ticket is filed under one, and canned responses are narrowed to the department a ticket is in.

Go to Help Desk › Ticket Setup › Departments and create the ones the desk actually splits into. Three or four is normal. Resist the urge to model your org chart — model the queues somebody has to work.

4Priorities and statuses

Under Help Desk › Ticket Setup › Priorities you get a default set with colours. Keep the number small; a five-level priority scale where everything is level two is a scale nobody uses.

Under Ticket Statuses, write statuses that say what is actually happening — Waiting on customer tells an agent more than Pending. A status is a name and two colours; closing a ticket is built in, so there is no status to make for it.

5Decide what the form asks

Help Desk › Ticket Setup › Forms controls what a customer is asked, in what order, and which fields are required. Eleven field types are available — including a dependent field that only appears when another answer calls for it — and fields can be shown per department.

Ask for the things you always end up asking for anyway — the URL, the version, the order number. Every field you add is a round trip you do not have later, and every field you add unnecessarily is a reason somebody abandons the form.

6Give your people a role

Agents are ordinary WordPress users with a help desk role. Edit a user and set their role:

Light Agent is the seat for the developer who has to look at the bug but must not reply to the person who reported it. Both tiers are free and neither is seat-limited.

Teams, per-role permissions and automatic assignment come with the Agents & Teams add-on.

7Make the email arrive

Under Help Desk › Outgoing Email › Email Templates you can edit every notification the desk sends. The defaults work; the sender name and address are worth setting before you go live. A separate reply-to address comes with the branding in the Customer Experience add-on.

WordPress sends mail through PHP by default, and a lot of hosts deliver that straight to spam. If notifications are not arriving, that is almost always why — send through a real mail server with the Email add-on, or any SMTP plugin.

8Test it as a customer

Open the support page in a private window, logged out, and file a ticket as a guest. Then answer it from the admin side. In ten minutes you will find every rough edge that matters:

• Does the form ask for something the customer cannot know?
• Does the confirmation email actually arrive?
• Can the customer find their ticket again?
• Does the reply read the way you want it to?

Where to go next

• Shortcodes and blocks — placing the form on its own, or just My Tickets.
• Upgrading to 5.0.0 — if you are coming from 4.x with add-ons installed.
• The 9 add-ons — when the desk needs teams, SLAs, a knowledge base or email piping.