Major rewrite of the Reply by Email and New Ticket by Email features. We replaced the PHP IMAP extension we had been using to retrieve email from POP3 and IMAP servers with the Horde IMAP library. The PHP IMAP extension has not been maintained in more than a decade and will very likely go away with PHP 8.0. The Horde IMAP library is written in pure PHP, it's faster and it's actively maintained. We also improved the handling of inline images in sent messages. Finally, we removed the system plugin to fetch email because it was unreliable. Please refer to the new CRON system for setting up a periodic task to fetch email.
Major upcoming change in GMail. We have removed the “I am using Gmail” option from our software because Google is discontinuing password authentication for IMAP access in the following months. There is an alternative but it's complicated – it requires you to do a complicated setup on Google's side before you can connect any self hosted application, such as ATS, to Gmail / G Suite mail. We strongly recommend forwarding your Gmail tickets to a regular IMAP or POP3 mailbox and have ATS connect to that mailbox instead. If you enjoy pain and suffering we have documented the complicated process to use Google's XOAUTH2 authentication method for IMAP access but please bear in mind that we are not even allowed to provide support for the setup on Google's side per their Terms of Service! Their support is hardly something to write home about. Therefore, if you chose to do that, you're effectively on your own. It's doable but extremely hard. You've been warned.
Dark Mode improvements. We improved the display of graphs and other display elements when using Dark Mode.
Custom fields can be made public. By default, custom fields are private, meaning that only the support staff and the ticket owner can see them – even on public tickets. You can now make specific fields public so anyone can see them. This is relevant e.g. in software support ticket systems where some environment details / versions may be required to provide context to someone reading a public ticket.
CRON system modernization.
Up until now you had a few CLI scripts to be used with CRON. The problem is that not all servers support real CRON
jobs. Also, we had to duplicate substantial amounts of code in each script. This version introduces a new CRON
system where each CRON command is provided by a Joomla plugin in the ats directory – the same plugin
that provide the feature to ATS. CRON tasks can be executed either by a single CRON CLI script or a
password-protected CRON URL. We have included shims with the old CLI CRON scripts so your CRON jobs don't break upon
upgrade but you should really upgrade your CRON jobs to the new format. If you're not sure how to do that, luckily,
Akeeba Ticket System now has a Scheduling Information page which tells you how to set up CRON jobs – that's the same
idea that's implemented in Akeeba Backup for the better part of a decade.
More automation options. We added more CRON tasks and more autoamtion features. You can now remove Manager Notes from closed / disabled tickets for better GDPR compliance, either on a schedule or automatically upon ticket close / unpublish. You can now send Auto-replies immediately when a new ticket is created without using a CRON job. You can automatically send a list of InstantReplies to a new ticket created by email, solving the problem of new tickets created by email not having the benefit of InstantReply.
Added option to use Twemoji library to replace Emoji with full color images. All browsers on macOS / iOS / iPadOS and Firefox on all platforms display full color images when Emoji is used. Any other browser on any other platform – notably Chrome on Windows – tend to display monochrome icons or broken characters. This makes for a jarring user experience when people communicate across platforms. You can now choose to use Twemoji to automatically replace all Emoji with full color images to improve the visual consistency of the tickets.
You can now have up to 99 custom statuses (previously: up to 9). That's on top of the built-in three ticket states. This is only meant to appeal to some very specific and complex use cases. Avoid custom ticket states if at all possible.
Bug fixes and minor improvements. Please take a look at the CHANGELOG below.
Akeeba Ticket System requires Joomla 3.8 or 3.9. It will not work on earlier Joomla versions.
We only officially support using our software with PHP 5.6, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3 or 7.4. We strongly advise you to run the latest available version of PHP on a branch currently maintained by the PHP project for security reasons. Older versions of PHP have known major security issues which are being actively exploited to hack sites and they have stopped receiving security updates, leaving you exposed to these issues.
Support for PHP 5.6 will be removed in the near future.
Please note that earlier PHP versions including but not limited to PHP 5.3, 5.4 and 5.5 are no longer supported and our software no longer works on them.