Support

1) In ATS 4 we were using our own custom fields. The downside is that we only ever supported a very limited number of field types and it was kind of a kludge. This feature was implemented back in the Joomla! 2.5 days, years before Joomla introduced Fields in version 3.7. It was both limited, and hard to maintain.

In ATS 5 we are using Joomla's Fields. There are plenty more field types, and you can install third party field plugins for even more field types than we could ever think of.

However, Joomla's Fields helper is very inflexible. It needs a form field for the category. The Fields helper reads it to find out which category is being used, and load the appropriate Fields into the form. As you know, Fields are tied to categories.

This is also why changing the category reloads the page, like you see in core content types since Joomla! 3.7: the Fields helper is a piece of PHP which has to re-run to reload the correct Fields for the newly selected category, and this can only realistically happen by reloading the page.

2) This is Joomla, not ATS.

Smart Search will index the canonical URL of the content and display that in the frame. There is no way to index a different URL for the frame and another one for direct navigation. I recommend replacing Smart Search with a custom search in DuckDuckGo (like we do) or Google.

Also note that Smart Search cannot index private tickets. This is a limitation of the Smart Search architecture. Its access control is based entirely on view levels. All private tickets for a given category belong to the same view level, but are only meant to be visible to their respective creator and the category's support staff. This is an access model which cannot be implemented in Smart Search. To avoid information leak we have to simply not index private tickets at all.

3) It was removed without a replacement in ATS 5.

4) AJAX ticket submission was removed in ATS 5. What we have instead is a whole page overlay while the HTTP POST is handled by the server.

If you really want to remove it you can do a template override for com_ats/ticket/default_spinner.php, removing the entire div#ats-onsubmit-overlay. The JavaScript in  media/com_ats/js/TicketsFrontend.min.js will see the element is missing and won't throw any errors.

Please note that by doing so there is nothing preventing an user from double-clicking the submit button, or an impatient user from clicking the submit button multiple times. Each time the button is pressed a new ticket / reply will be created. The whole reason the overlay exists is to prevent these erroneous submissions. There's really no other way to do it reliably.

I am talking about the same thing. The reason this field exists in the form is that we support custom Fields. In order for us to support custom Fields at all -- regardless of whether you want to use them or not -- we MUST include the Category field in the form. Remember that the form is a static XML file which cannot be overridden in a template override. You can of course use CSS to hide it.