support-mailer

Introduction

The aim of this app is to provide a simple front end for staff to submit a support request, using fields to easily capture the data.

Frameworks

Frameworks are Laravel 5.6, Blade, Bootstrap 4, and jQuery. I have configured the project to use LESS but there is very little to migrate should you want to use something else.

Features

Configurable items include:

• Form heading
• Form title
• Intro text on form page
• Support provider list (name and email) with default setting
• Option to show one or multiple providers
• Staff list
• Option to display staff list dropdown or regular input fields (in case you don't want to maintain a staff list)
• Issue type list
• User management

Other features:

• Access control - Admin/Editor/Viewer
• Log viewer (all tickets are written to the log)

On submitting, an email will be sent to the support provider with:

• Intro text
• Staff details (name, preferred contact method)
• Issue type
• Details

The email will be sent from the staff member's email address, so this is ideal for support providers that send an automated response when they receive a request (e.g. Zendesk), confirming a ticket has been created.

Installation

A few quick notes for Windows + Vagrant (e.g. Homestead) devs:

• You will probably have to SSH into the Vagrant box to run the composer and artisan commands. I'm sure there's a way around this, but if you're struggling to run these commands from a bash console, this is the easiest thing to do.
• Unless you already have npm running properly in your environment, save yourself the hassle and install node.js for Windows now (unless you feel like wrasslin' with Vagrant for hours).
• Don't forget to update your hosts file, as well as Homestead.yaml if you're using it.

Oh, one other thing - I highly recommend using mailtrap.io for testing your dev output. It's really simple to set up and is easier than building render methods (ymmv of course).

As follows:

1. Clone the repo
2. Run composer install
3. Copy the .env.example to .env, update the settings to match your environment.
4. Add User table seed config to your .env file - see UsersTableSeeder.php for the specifics
5. Generate an app key - php artisan key:generate
6. Create your database
7. Migrate and seed your database - php artisan:migrate --seed (or leave the seed switch off if you prefer not to)
8. Run npm install from the project root
9. Run npm run dev - this will copy Bootstrap 4 and jQuery into your public directory (via Webpack)

Future Features

• Pagination
• Log exporting
• LDAP to pull AD users in via cron job