Support

Akeeba Ticket System is not going away. We've been selling this product since 2011 and we're happy with how it performs, both as software for our own site and as a product. It is already compatible with Joomla 4 beta. I've been making our software compatible with Joomla 4 since its alpha 2 release a couple of years ago, with a pause of about 9 months when the Joomla 4 core APIs and template were being reworked in a way that made it futile working on it. I resumed the effort about a month before Joomla 4 beta 1 was released and we published the fully J4 compatible versions less than 10 days after Joomla 4 Beta 1 was publicly released. Go ahead and install a Joomla 4 development site and install ATS on it. It works. Unlike, say, all of Regular Labs' software at the time of this writing.

It's funny that you mention Joomla 4. You may not know it, but Joomla 4 exists at all thanks to yours truly. Back in 2015 I wrote a series of blog posts which started the conversation for a new Joomla release. I put together the people who wanted to move Joomla forward at J and Beyond 2015 on a (literal) round table discussion. I personally proposed two thirds of its features which comprise its core architecture. Nobody was talking namespaces and containers before I proved them viable with FOF 3 and used that to convince everyone else on the table that this is the way to go forward with Joomla 4. Its roadmap was written on paper with my own handwriting. So, yeah, you can definitely say we are fully committed to Joomla 4, more than any other Joomla extensions developer.

Akeeba Subscriptions was a very different and unique case. What is a subscriptions / membership component? Depending on who you ask it's selling software on-line, selling access to digital content hosted on your site, a CRM for off-line club/magazine/whatever memberships etc. Now, each one of these is a separate product category with different needs and requirements. On top of that you have to deal with taxation, payments integration, third party Joomla extensions integration, third party services integration and so on and so forth. We were trying to sell a component allowing you to sell software and digital content hosted on your site, integrating with a few major payments providers and Joomla permissions. Unfortunately, within less than a year it became apparent that few, if any, people were interested in that. Its product category is so loosely defined that we were asked to essentially build a different application for each client. This was impossible to do on a flat fee, so we discontinued it in 2013. Still, we kept it alive as a free of charge product with regular public releases until July 2019. At that point new feature development ceased but we're still providing compatibility bug fixes until Joomla 3's end of life in Q4 2022. How many companies, especially of our size, offer 9 years of updates to a discontinued product for free?

The other Joomla product we discontinued is Akeeba CMS Update. I'll tell you why. Because we got it contributed back to Joomla itself! The Joomla Update component you're using to update Joomla is Akeeba CMS Update under another name. In 2016 the last remaining feature, email notifications for available updates, was contributed back to Joomla so Akeeba CMS Update had no longer a reason for existing and was discontinued.

We did also discontinue Akeeba Remote Control (the desktop application) and SiteDiff. They made sense in 2008 but not so much circa 2011. The world was moving to automation which calls for CLI tools. Also, the programming language we were using for them were discontinued. The former is replaced by Akeeba Remote CLI and the latter by the PHP File Change Scanner feature in Admin Tools. We discontinued Akeeba eXtract because it didn't make sense either; we had already implemented its features in Kickstart and you can run Kickstart on a local web server or from the CLI. People were also unhappy that it was a .NET application and demanded that we spent unreal amounts of time or money to write native applications for each and every operating system and desktop environment. Sure, if we could charge about 400€ per year for it. That was unrealistic so we discontinued it in favour of maintaining Kickstart.

As for DocImport, it has been continuously available free of charge since 2007 on our site. You will find it in the Downloads section of our site. This is a very niche product. It takes a DocBook XML file and presents it as generated HTML pages in Joomla. It's what we use for our documentation. I know of another two people using it.

We are not Google. We don't kill products off with zero notice and no replacement. We respect our users. We understand that they rely on our software to fulfil their business goals. We tread carefully.

Regarding the "message box", I believe you are talking about the editor area where you can write your ticket or reply text. This is NOT handled by ATS. We ask Joomla to render its configured editor. This is handled by Joomla's core code and the code of the editor you are using. I can tell you that it works with Joomla's built-in editors (TinyMCE and CodeMirror) and JCE. I believe it shouldn't work with ArkEditor since they follow a very different approach that's suitable for editing articles, not as a generic editor. All other third party WYSIWYG editors I found for Joomla seemed abandoned. In any case, the problem you describe sounds like a JavaScript issue between the editor you are using and a third party plugin running on the page. That's basically the extent of the help we can give you for a core Joomla feature handled by code we haven't written. I recommend using Joomla's built-in TinyMCE or JCE – either way, use their profiles feature to limit what users can do with the editor. On our live site we are using JCE. On our development site we are using Joomla's TinyMCE, CodeMirror and JCE for developing and testing ATS.

I really can't be of much help with JCE. It's not our code. All I can tell you is that having this conversation on akeeba.com is proof that it works – that's what we use here. You can and should ask Ryan, its developer, for help.

You can of course set a default editor in Global Configuration and this will be used by all users who have not set a preference. That's why you were able to use JCE here on akeeba.com to file a ticket and submit your reply to it. We have too many clients for me to go and click on each and every one of them to set a default editor. I'd rather let Joomla do the hard work for me.

If you are worried about JCE exposing too many features to unprivileged users, as I said: it supports different user profiles based on the user group your users belong to. When you are replying to your ticket look at your editor toolbar. This is JCE. Yeah, it's stripped down to barebones. This is what you see as an unprivileged user. What I see as support staff is a far richer toolbar with all the trimmings. We just have three different JCE user profiles on our site: one for guests (what you see in the Contact Us page when logged out), one for registered users and one for support staff and Super Users. If you don't understand how user profile work ask Ryan. He can help you. He helped me with a weird use case I had that with regards to inserting images and which ended up being a new feature he implemented in JCE :)

Moreover, users can set their preferred editor through their profile page. Joomla's login module includes a link to edit their profile by default. You don't have to manually change their editor. If you want to prevent them from changing their editor you can unpublished all editor plugins except JCE – or set their Access to Special so they are only available to Super Users.

Regarding DocImport, it's one of those things which you either know you need and how to use or you really don't need to use. If you don't know what DocBook XML is you probably don't need it.

Generally speaking, there's no point in having an FAQ section in a support system which runs inside a content management system. You can always create an articles category and articles. You can create a template override for the new ticket page and / or publish a Custom module in the ticket list page linking people to your FAQ section.

The DocImport integration for ATS is something we wrote specifically for our site. Unlike most of our ATS clients we have dozens of people every week asking the same, repeated questions which are already answered in our documentation written years ago. Our documentation is hundreds of pages long so we can't ask our clients to browse through it before submitting a ticket. We have to magically search it for them and try to guide them towards the right page. That's why we needed this integration. This is not something that most – if any – of our clients need and definitely not something you need for your much simpler use case. You are talking about a dozen or so articles. They are easier to implement as Joomla content and ask people to read them first. A dozen articles can be glanced over in a few minutes. A 300+ page documentation book? Not so much.