Major rewrite. We have rewritten Akeeba Ticket system using core Joomla 4 MVC, core Joomla Bootstrap 5 in the backend and custom CSS in the frontend (with a Bootstrap 5 fallback for those of you who make custom templates based off Cassiopeia). Please consult the migration notes in our documentation.
Using Joomla Custom Fields instead of ATS Custom Fields. Old custom fields are NOT migrated.. The new custom fields leverage the full power of Joomla fields, a feature which did not exist back in 2010 when we first wrote ATS. Our documentation has walkthroughs on using them in really powerful ways, even allowing you to have private fields in public tickets your clients can fill in when you want them to be allowed to do that.
You can tag tickets using Joomla's core Tags feature.. This replaces the Tickets Buckets feature. If the tags are public you can also show public tickets to your site's visitors using Joomla's Tags component.
Using core Joomla Tags for users; old user tags are NOT migrated.. The old user tags have been removed. This was a feature added in ATS long before Joomla had its own tags feature. Our documentation explains how to create private tags only the support staff can see.
Attachments are now organised into two-level subdirectories (example: ab/cd/abcdef0123456789abcdef0123456789) to prevent filesystem issues.. The time it takes to list a directory and/or access its files is O(N2) to the number of directory entries (files and folders) directly under the directory, meaning that twice as many files take four times as much time to access. Practically speaking, after a couple of thousand files it takes well over a second to list and access the files. This would make uploading and downloading attachments painfully slow. Using the two directory levels each of the innermost directories which holds the actual attachment files will have up to a few hundred files, speeding attachments operations a lot on sites with thousands of attachments in total. Old attachments are still accessible, don't worry!
Using Joomla's Email Templates feature instead of our own email template manager. Our email templates feature predated Joomla's own feature by more than a decade. We have now discontinued our email templates feature, using Joomla's feature instead. You will need to migrate your existing email templates. Please consult the migration notes in our documentation.
Multiple ticket state filtering in Category (Tickets), My Tickets, Assigned and Latest Open views in the frontend. In previous versions you would either have no filter or could only select a single ticket state e.g. only Open or only Pending. You can now select multiple ticket states which is especially convenient when you are using many custom ticket states.
Emails for Manager Notes. In the past a manager's note would not be communicated to other managers receiving emails for the ticket and/or the assigned manager. We now added the ability to send an email notification for Manager Notes, allowing the managers to be instantly notified on internal discussions without having to revisit a ticket to check manually for new manager notes.
Maximum post size feature. You can now limit the maximum length of a ticket post (initial post or reply). This can be used to, for instance, prevent users from posting a really long log file inline the ticket body instead of attaching it. Yup, we had a few people doing that and the browser just couldn't handle rendering it, crashing or hanging.
Gravatar integration is now built into the component instead of being a plugin.. Third party avatar integrations are still possible as plugins. Gravatar is used as the default fallback.
Displaying the user's User Groups is now built into the component instead of being a plugin.. You can toggle that feature in the component's Options.
Replaced InstantSearch; it now searches your site with Smart Search or an external search engine. Old plugins removed.. In the past we were using a customised and naive search which only looked for public tickets and Akeeba DocImport articles. This was very inconvenient when you had resources in a different component, e.g. Joomla's core articles, as you had to write your own plugin, raising the bar for making an integration. Now we are using Joomla's Smart Search (com_finder) which can search public tickets, Akeeba DocImport articles, Joomla core articles and much, much more. If you'd rather use a third party search engine such as Google, DuckDuckGo, Yandex etc you can do that instead. Or you can turn this feature off completely if you so wish.
The Time Cards feature is now a report instead of a hard to use graph. Gone are the days when you had to hover over each name to see how much time each support staff member spent over the last month. You now have a much easier to read report.
Sending emails is now built into the component instead of being a plugin. Sending emails can be toggled off by unpublishing the email templates in Joomla's Mail Templates page.
CLI scripts are now replaced by Joomla 4 CLI commands. We no longer have separate CLI scripts. All automation goes through Joomla's cli/joomla.php, the Joomla! CLI Application. Please consult the migration notes in our documentation.
Removed FOF and FEF dependencies.. As noted, we are using core Joomla MVC, Bootstrap 5 and custom CSS.
Removed integration with Akeeba Subscriptions; the component was discontinued in April 2019..
Removed Credits support; there was no viable method to automatically manage credits anymore. Also, lack of interest.. The only two ways to add credits, Akeeba Subscriptions and AlphaUserPoints, were discontinued in 2019 and 2017 respectively. Moreover, the whole credits feature was used by all of two people and made our code overly complex as there was yet another level of “permissions” to take into account. Therefore it was removed and will not be coming back.
Some less used features removed and others are replaced with core Joomla features. The following features have been removed:
Bug fixes and minor improvements. Please take a look at the CHANGELOG below.
-->Due to the complete rewrite of Akeeba Ticket System you cannot just install the new version on top of the old one and have everything work trouble-free especially if you were using any of the following features:
Our documentation has migration instructions. We strongly recommend working on your migration on a dev site first and test thoroughly to ensure you are not missing anything important when you upgrade to Akeeba Ticket System 5.
Please consult our Compatibility page. It explains our version support policy and lists which versions of our software are compatible with which versions of Joomla and PHP.