Hesk Helpdesk (And Enhancements!)
December 6th, 2009 | 
Author: I came across the free, open source Hesk Helpdesk (http://www.hesk.com) while I was looking for a light weight help system for a project that was starting up. The project has since been put on hold, but Hesk is still a great application for a helpdesk/knowledge base. Hesk is offered as a free downloadable PHP script, as well as a Hosted Version if you do not have a server. The hosted version will cost you $20 US a month. You can also by a license for the downloadable version for $39.95 US to remove the Hesk branding.
While this application is great…
- Allows unlimited staff
- Granular permissions to the system and help desk categories
- Excellent knowledge base built in
- Innovative system that doesn’t require user accounts for clients
It is lacking a few features. I plan to use this application to respond to clients from a number of different projects. As such, it would be nice if they didn’t see ALL of the problem types when submitting tickets. Because Hesk is open source, we can make a few tweaks to get directly to a specific problem type.
Hesk also allows custom fields for your tickets, but it shows all custom fields on all problem types. This can get confusing for users in a multi-project environment. I’m developing a little hack to get around this limitation.
I’ve outlined both of these changes required on my wiki, you can take a look here.
Posted in 
Tags:
@ first , THANK YOU ALOT for this enhancement to HESK !!
& PLEASE …
we need this hack to work in admin views too …
can you modify the admin view of tickets plz ?
I haven’t looked at this in a while, but I might get a chance in a few weeks. I’ll make a followup post when I get around to making the changes. The projects I had intended to use Hesk for all fell through, so I haven’t actually used it since I implemented these hacks. Thanks for the comment though, and glad to see that a few people are actually using this work.
Hi & tnx for your reply .
you don’t know how much this hack helped me at my work .
the only little problem is that the ID of categories are shown in admin ticket views before custom fields name.
as a part of your tutorial for this , you told that we need to modify the printed name of the custom field, otherwise it will print the numbers before the name :
$temp = explode(‘_’,$v['name']);
$v['name'] = $temp[1];
i think we need to add this somewhere in admin files (i guess admin_ticket.php ) for disable printing of category IDs before custom field names…
again thank you very much for helping us.
God blest you.
Hey to anyone reading. I’ve taken another quick look at this and modified the admin_ticket.php file to achieve this. I’ve added the steps as the optional step 5: http://wiki.cornempire.net/hesk/start#optional_5_modify_admin_ticketphp
Only 4 small tweaks needed. Let me know if there are any issues with it.
Nice demo and good instructions. I started using the Hesk desk about 2 months ago and after getting my clients to use it to communicate with me, now they are requesting that I put it on their websites too.
About your mod, is it possible to wrap it like a module, plug-in so that future updates don’t require duplicating work.
As much as I love the idea of the mod, and I have installed many when we used to use osCommerce, I won’t do this for a client. I will have to install multiple installations for those who need more custom features.
Thanks again and I look forward to hearing your thoughts.
Alex
I’m not sure how easy it would be to make it into a pluggable module since it is a total hack that is modifying the source of the application. What I would recommend is hacking a version (ie 2.1/2.2/etc) first, and then use those PHP scripts to deploy to your clients. Assuming they don’t require any other customizations, it shouldn’t be too much of a hassle. But you are right, these customizations need to be repeated for each version change.
Now that 2.2 is out, I may make my modifications, and then upload the changed files. Then, assuming no other customizations, you can just drop those into your installations.