Introduction

Package origins

At the beginnings of year 2017, we were looking for many weeks for a ticketing system that had both the features we needed and also to be able to install in our local server, our corporate and internal website. Also we were looking for Laravel 5 compatibility. Firstable, we did our first attempt with Faveo helpdesk. It seemed a good solution at first glance. It has some advanced features, and the appearance is very good, but we quit it due to some problems configuring it.

Once we found Ticketit we fell in love with it. Even more when starting to look at that so clean written source code. It doesn't had advanced features like Faveo or others, but it was a perfect starting point to us. In fact, we had in mind very specific features among other common ones, so we needed to take an existing package as a base to build up our system from.

Our goals for our ticketing system

We want Panic Help Desk to:

• Be and keep it always Free for any use, like all the packages and libraries made by others that today are the core base of PanicHD. Without them, I would never be possible to build it.
• Be usable in an internal corporate website for IT (or any other) department helpdesk, what we understand for an Intranet. For that, we needed to increase package weight to hold all those javascript and css packages and fonts that were originally using CDN's, basically in Ticketit, to let the ticketing system work without internet connection.
• Have all the features we want it to, but make all of them optional, and let any sysadmin decide which ones may be enabled or not in his installation. Why would anyone else need to spent his/her time to build a tagging system or file attachments to the package which maybe are very common features instead of making cooler and more specific things to suit their needings? Using the existing ticketit configuration settings, we have added specific settings to enable / disable any of the main new features of the package, so anyone can customize it without specific builds or complex installation process.
• To be installable and manageable with as few developer specific knowledge as possible. We want it to be used as widely as possible and to be liked both by system admins and developers. Short to say but may take long time to accomplish. Anyway, it's our way and we'll try to do our best for it.

Features inherited from Kordy/Ticketit

Panic Help Desk is just a customized and expanded version of Kordy/Ticketit. Ticketit includes most of the functionality you will see in Panic Help Desk, including:

• The three user roles: Users, agents and admins
• Interaction between them through tickets, comments and ticket statuses / completion
• Installation and upgrade menu
• Ticket and users stats
• A very complete and customizable configuration settings management
• Many translations including German, Spanish, Russian, Arabic...

If you want to read more about the original kordy/ticketit features, please go to their github project page https://github.com/thekordy/ticketit/wiki/v0.2-Features