Deploying a Support Center
From Cerberus Helpdesk Wiki
The Cerb4 Support Center is the public face of your Helpdesk that your clients will interact with. Anyone that's not part of your internal organization typically should interact with you by traditional e-mail or by submitting tickets through the Support Center. While there are several additional features enabled through modules, you can use as many or as few as you want. The only pre-requisite is you have a Support Center up and running that's accessible from a URL your customers can browse to.
We do have a Quick Start guide, that may be all you need to get yourself off on the right track. I'd start there and determine if the basics are enough to work with. For the rest of you who may need a little more handholding, you may find the extra information here beneficial as there are a couple of legitimate reasons to include a second slightly redundant beginner's tutorial.
- To flesh out the "Installation" part of the Quick Start guide beyond the handful of bullet points you see. The following is a larger, more detailed explanation complete with screenshots and troubleshooting tips.
- To create a solid foundation for every other Support Center related article we write in the future. This would make the complementary walkthroughs more succinct by abstracting just the installation part of the process and nothing else; allowing me to realistically assume you were familiar with setup when explaining other related features built on top of it. If I'm trying to explain how a Knowledgebase operates I can simply point you to the install instructions here and move on, without cluttering the unique aspects of the tutorial.
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[edit] Demo?
If you're trying out Cerb4 with a private On-Demand demo, note that the Support Center is NOT pre-configured for you to trial. Because the Support Center expects you to install it separately either on it's own server or in another directory it shares with the main Helpdesk, we at WGM who host the desks would have to create a dedicated space for it.
Thus the bad news is you will need your own test server like the people who put Cerb4 into actual production, the good news is you can use the rest of this guide just like everyone else to create a new Support Center to work with the demo.
[edit] Creating a new Support Center
Installations start in 'helpdesk setup', 'Community Portals' so go ahead and open up that tab in your browser. If you don't see it, you might need to enable "Usermeet Communities" in 'Features & Plugins' first. Once inside create a new community Support Center.
Communities are simply groupings to keep your public-facing sites (portals) organized by a common theme such as product or company, where each community can contain one or more portals. You may have noticed that the only one to actually choose from is in fact the Support Center, making this extra layer of categorization a little confusing and perhaps a tad redundant. The reason for this comes from the early days of Cerb4 when knowledgebases and contact form builders were also separate portals, instead of being merged into optional Support Center modules as they are now. Unfortunately since there is always the possibility we add new types of portals, we probably won't be phasing it out any time soon and you'll just have to work around it.
- Click "Support Center" in the left sidebar to continue.
[edit] Copying index.php file
We're going to avoid discussing all the options at your disposal right now, and just get a barebones Support Center up and running immediately -- no modules, no information to display.
Scroll down to the bottom and inside the "Installation" area copy and paste the contents of the ‘index.php’ section into an index.php file. (.htaccess?)
Now decide where you're going to install your Support Center, as this decision has an impact on the URL your customers will use to access it. "Community Portals" like the Support Center are designed to be independent of the Helpdesk interface and should be installed in a unique directory. It could really be anywhere, in its own sub-directory or on a separate web server completely -- as long as it’s publicly accessible that’s all that matters.
For instance, if your Helpdesk is installed at example.com/cerb4/ then you could place the index.php file on your web server at htdocs/supportcenter/index.php .
- The Support Center is now up! Try accessing the proper URL in your browser, using "index.php" if necessary.
[edit] Choosing your features and seeing your changes in action
While it's perfectly acceptable to learn and configure everything upfront, to showcase the "dynamic" nature of this whole process it was postponed until you got the Support Center installed first. By dynamic I mean once things are up and running there's no re-installation you have to do each time you enable a new feature. You can easily turn on a few options, tweak a few settings, save, then refresh your Support Center to see the changes immediately in your browser. In other words you don't have to recopy the index.php contents because it will "update" itself automatically.
Now we're back to all those Support Center tools we passed by initially... Well, there's not a whole lot to say as far as basic configuration is concerned; decide which individual modules you will offer to your users and adjust any options to fit your workflow. With that said, obviously there is a ton of explanation needed to grasp what does what exactly and we've separated those into separate tutorials. All of them naturally assume you've deployed a Support Center as explained already, so after you're done with this guide, check out our other documentation.
[edit] Troubleshooting
Generally speaking, once the index.php file is copied and the Support Center is accessible from you web browser it's smooth sailing unless you find any display issues. Anything ranging from blank pages, to "page not found" errors, to missing images inside an "empty" outline, is of course a problem. Here are a couple of things you can check, starting from top to bottom.
[edit] Cerb4 upgrades
After you upgrade your Helpdesk, it's possible your existing Support Center will stop working if the index.php file has changed too. In this case, you will need to replace it just this one time (or until your next big update). Back in the "Installation" area of the 'Community Portals' tab where we copied the index.php contents before, scroll down about a dozen lines or so and compare this line,
against the same line in the actual index.php file you deployed. If the number is different you should replace the index.php file for your Support Center with the new version from the Helpdesk.
[edit] .htaccess
You may have also noticed in the "Installation" area an optional .htaccess file you can copy along with your index.php file.
If you're comfortable with .htaccess you can place that in the same directory for "friendlier" Support Center URLs. However, all it really does is drop the /index.php/ part of your URL to make it a little cleaner (example.com/supportcenter/index.php). Since people have run into issues in the past and happily went without this shortcut, if you run into any issues a good thing to try is removing the file.
[edit] PHP 5
These last two checks are a little more rare and most likely will only be an issue if your hosting machine isn't up to par. Just like the Helpdesk itself the Support Center does require PHP 5, therefore if you are putting the community portal on a separate machine make sure it's PHP 5 too.
[edit] Shared hosting
The Support Center does require outbound connections in order to talk to the Helpdesk, so if a hosting provider blocks them it won't look right. Double check with your provider as a last and final resort.
