Support Platform - Knowledge base & support tickets

JasperVriends

ℹ️ The extension has been released and is available, check out this topic!

Since my first contact with extending Flarum with my plugin Flarum SEO, some ideas came up in my head. One of these ideas was this plugin.

Flarum does have a lot of potential apart from just being forum software. It can be used by companies to generate a community around their products and give them support on the forums.

In my case we also made some tags as 'knowledge base', but that's getting a bit chaotic as we're filling them with information and topics. That's why I'm now actually building this plugin!

What will this do? 📚️

With this plugin you can select a tag that will pretend to be a 'Knowledge base'. All tags inside the 'Knowledge base' tag will serve as categories.

The plugin will add a new path to your Flarum: https://example.com/knowledgebase and will show your categories on a fancy knowledge base page witch you can customize. When going to a category it loads the help topics you've written.

There is also a big search bar available, your guests will be able to only search inside your knowledge base tags to find your information topics.

When going to an article, a new page opens with just the article. No the discussion layout and users won't be able to reply (maybe that's something for the future 😃 ). Admins can still control the articles on this page, they can rename, edit the tags, changing the content and everything else.

Cool! And what more? 📨 🦸

It will be possible to handle some customer support through 'support tickets'. How easy would it be to have everything on the same platform? A forum, a knowledge base and support tickets, all in one!

Users can send in a support ticket by register them on your website and fill in the fields. All open support tickets will be shown on a dashboard. From there you can handle your customer support!

Free or paid? 💲

This extension will be a paid extension as it will require a lot of work to maintain and to add more features in the future. But, there will be a demo available soon so everyone can enjoy it! 🙂

ℹ️ The extension has been released and is available, check out this topic!

Okay, now the good stuff!

Yeah! I've already some great screenshots with how the knowledge base looks and feels 🙂

Going to the knowledge base overview:

Browsing through categories:

Browsing through articles:

Using the searchbar:

More to follow soon 🙂

The extension has been released and is available, check out this topic!

Let me know what you think 😃

theportablegeek

This is amazing JasperVriends ! Are you thinking of doing premium as one-time payment or monthly?

JasperVriends

theportablegeek Thanks! I'm thinking about monthly, as I'll keep working on the plugin. I think it will be worth it when I'll add more and more features to it 🙂

theportablegeek

JasperVriends Thanks for the quick reply 😁 Definitely feeling the value of this for monthly payment but 🤞its affordable for my team! Great work 👍️

jordanjay29

This sounds like a very useful extension!

Will it be possible to make multiple knowledge base tags for additional categorization and/or permission-based access?

JasperVriends

jordanjay29 At this moment the plugin only supports one main-tag with its sub tags. But I will add the possibility to select multiple tags so those can serve as main-categories.

So eventually the structure can look like this:

Knowledge base main tag about product 1
- Subtag 1
  - Article 1
  - Article 2
  - Article 3
- Subtag 2
  - Article 1
  - Article 2
  - Article 3
Knowledge base main tag about product 2
- Subtag 1
  - Article 1
  - Article 2
  - Article 3
- Subtag 2
  - Article 1
Another knowledge base main tag about the API
- Subtag 1
  - Article 1
  - Article 2
- Subtag 2
  - Article 1
  - Article 2
  - Article 3
    Etc....

If only one main category is selected, the subtags will be shown directly on the frontpage.

The extension relies on the Flarum tags plugin so it won't be possible to add more sub-tag-categories, but I do not think that will be a problem as it can result into making a labyrinth with too many tags and subtags 😝

The user rights of the tag plugin will not be changed by the plugin, so that's still possible to show categories based on permission! 🙂

jordanjay29

JasperVriends It sounds fantastic, I can't wait to see it in use.

JasperVriends

MrB That's great to hear! I'll make it great! 😁

Some progress

I've got some progress here! The knowledge base is almost how I want it, I added lots of management tools so you don't need to change too much stuff inside the admin panel. Only administrators or competent moderators will see these editing buttons and will be able to change stuff. The normal users won't even see them 🙂

Multiple main categories:

jordanjay29 asked, I delivered! It's now possible to create more main categories.

A sub-category

When you have multiple main categories for your knowledge base, normal categories will become 'sub-categories'. From here you can also create a new main categories.

Quick article editing

From a category you can quick-rename an article you see it in the list. You can also hide, recover and delete them from here. This can be handy when you're checking on spelling mistakes or want to hide some articles.

Quick post articles

I added the feature to direct create articles when you're in a category. It will automatically select the correct tags from the category.

Edit & share articles

It's now possible to edit articles from a settings dropdown. You can also change the article name and tags.

To make sure that your users can find your article again, there is a permalink added as 'share article'. So nothing will happen when you rename articles or move them to other categories!

That's it for now

Any suggestions? 🙂

ChadJessen

This looks amazing! I can see my website using something like this. In nursing there are a lot of things that nurses need to remember and what a great platform to keep all those things in one spot.

Now I just need to get people to actually use the forum, but that is a whole other topic.

JasperVriends

It's great to see all the interest for this extension! This will motivate me a lot 😃 Thanks Digital ChadJessen

Digital

I'll definitely pay for this one. Amazing work @JasperVriends !

Another awesome extension to get excited on using Flarum.

MrB

Cool Stuff. I worked a lot with the Khoros/Lithium "Tribal Knowledge Base" which had the initial focus on "curating" community content to KB Articles. In reality most of the time it is not user generated content though.

I think there is a lot of potential to extend the entire KB topic. Most companies have isolated KB's and an additional community, they are not connected at all.

With Flarum we used the same approach you describe above for one of our customers by using an "FAQ" Label and make these Threads read only.

Overall I think the future is to bring all this together and integrate it back to your homepage, make it searchable with federated search or with content syndication.

Looking forward to see how your extension is progressing.....

luceos

JasperVriends how is styling applied. Does it follow global styles?

JasperVriends

luceos Mostly yes, the dropdowns, textboxes and the composer are all components that I re-used. I also used the @primary-color and @secondary-color in the .less files for some other element styling, so it will use the same colors as the rest of the theme. I'm still thinking about the ability to customize colors differently then the forum, but I'll look at that later as that's not my priority at the moment 😛

The knowledge base articles do have a .Post-body tag around them, so earlier written articles and posts will look the same 😃

andreherberth

This..this right here is exactly what I have been looking for in regards of Pockethold support/knowledge base tracking. Much more convenient then a discord/github/custom ticket combination!

Can't wait 🤤

JasperVriends

First demo of the knowledge base got online on the Buttonizer community (a community for a WordPress plugin). We still need to fill the categories better. We'll need to play with it a bit.

The support ticket system has not been written yet. So it's all about the knowledge base at the moment 😃

Link to the kowledge base: https://community.buttonizer.pro/knowledgebase

Let me know your thoughts! 💭

datitisev

JasperVriends You are an absolute god! This is amazing! It all looks so nice and integrated as if it was part of the forum as well. Great job 👌.

EDIT: undefined, but otherwise... I have no words to describe this. 👍️.

theportablegeek

JasperVriends This is spectacular!!!!!!!!!!!

JasperVriends

datitisev theportablegeek Thanks! It's great to hear that! 😃

That undefind thing is something to look at. I'll fix that soon 🙂

MrB

I think this is an awesome extension! What would be a good ad on is a "helpful" rating which is very common in knowledgebases.

JasperVriends Just talked to one of our customers and he would be very interested to use the extension ;-) Can we support somehow to speed up things?

JasperVriends

MrB Thanks!

Currently I'm working on a project that requires my attention for a while. Also I am on an internship 5 days a week so my time is a bit limited at the moment 👀

What functions of this project do you need for the forum? I may start with the knowledge base part only and then later add the support desk part. So it can be released earlier.

What are your thoughts?