Katak and OsTicket

Katak is a fork of the famous open source project OsTicket ver. 1.6 that we used for many installations before starting with an official fork. Below the list of the main changes we made.

The new functionality:

  • Multilingual system using Gettext. The system admin can change the language of the support system.
  • The choice of the ticket topic for the client is now optional.
  • Multiple attachments: Now you can attach multiple files to a ticket.
  • Introduced the “Reopen grace period”. After this period, set by the administrator, the ticket can no longer be re-opened by the client.
  • It is possible to enable the ability to see unassigned tickets for staff members. In other words, you can have staff members who can only see tickets assigned to yourself. The navigation bar will change accordingly.
  • Role permission are enhanced and simplified and there is no more confusion between role and account type.
  • The staff profile now shows the member´s own department.
  • Ticket assignment: In the scroll menu for each staff member is now shown also his own department.
  • More secure password managemen with the use of SHA512, salting and stretching in computing the hash.

The code:

We are making an effort to simplify the code and separate the graphic from the logic. We are streamlining the code, moving the database queries inside the classes and adding more comments. In addition, our goal is to obtain a HTML5 and CSS3 compliant site.
For the connection with the database the system now uses the mysqli extension.

The database:

The structure is more or less the same, but we merged two tables, modified others and deleted some fields, in order to obtain more simplicity and speed.
Unless osTicket ver.1.7, the attachments remain outside of the database.

The graphics:

We've changed a lot of the graphics. The objective is to arrive at a responsive interface, at least for the client interface. Therefore we have eliminated as much as possible the tables: there should be no more tables in table (HTML5 deprecated).
The ticket is shown separating the original ticket from the subsequent communications.
There is no more the menu “Show answered”: Instead, the ticket status (source, assigned, answered, overdue) is indicated by icons.