Equipment plugin revival and call to developers

poctob

Hello everyone,I'd like to apologize for not being responsive enough last year, I was quite busy with other projects and didn't have much time to work on OST related stuff. At the end of last year I made a significant career move and now I have more free time to dedicate to open source projects. Here is my plan for the 2016 for anyone interested:Overhaul of the Equipment PluginMove to Laravel 5+ frameworkFix all outstanding bugsImplement suggested enhancementsEmployee scheduling calendar plugin development. This will allow to create work schedule for help desk agents. This software is already written by me as a stand alone application, so it is only a matter of converting it to PHP and making it a OST plugin. Some features are the time clock, time-off requests and fine grain management of shifts and employees.Event and item booking plugin. This is a new endeavor. The idea is to have an ability for the end user to schedule and on-site repair call, to rent a piece of equipment, or to book a facility. I would like to get some opinions on these ideas and see if there are potential real life implementations for existing OSTicket users.Help Needed!I like to be challenged, but this is a lot a work for one person, if you have open source experience and would like to participate with these projects, please let me know. I will gladly accept any help from programmers, UI designers and testers. If you have a similar ongoing project I can help you with it as a trade.

Chefkeks

Hi there,we currently have our own "facility and item booking" system which a former colleague wrote some years ago. I could tell you some real-life experiences (we run the system since 2008) but cannot share code and also cannot help since I'll be busy 2016 with a lot of projects and also don't have the knowledge to do (not a total noob, but also not a real coder - sysadmin with some coding skills to help myself)Since I currently do not have time to share my experience, I'll come back and write down what our experiences are with our own "facility and item booking" system.Cheers,Michael

kisley

This sounds great! We've had OSTicket for about a year and are just now beginning to get into the equipment plug-in. We are a nonprofit of ~70 staff with a five-person facilities management crew (scattered between several sites), and the employee scheduling calendar and the event and item booking both sound like things we could use immediately. (We might even be able to use the scheduling calendar for donation pickups and tracking volunteer groups, depending on the implementation).

I have no coding skills, but perhaps we could help by field-testing? Let me know if that would be helpful.

buck_rogers

It's a great plugin, and I've used it to teach myself with your tutorial. What would be ideal, and what I've tried to do, is integrate it into the native osTicket program. What I wish is that the plugin lent itself a little different to templating. I think that would alleviate lots of the need for twig and MV* frameworksPlease don't take that as offensive. You are ten times better at it than me, and I might take your road as well, but the thought of learning another framework to build something that's part of another framework sounds like a long way around. I've not done much here, so I don't want to overstep my bounds. Only a suggestion.I've not used Laravel myself, though I am very aware of it. I typically build inhouse stuff because I don't like magic, but I'm willing to do something, if I can. Tell me what I could help with. No promises, but I can try. You helped with your tutorial. I'd like to help you.

poctob

The big issue is that OSTicket doesn't have a framework. It is a hodge podge of obsolete technologies badly stitched together. The original code base may have started with good intentions, but it grew out of control and now it is in a bad need of a re-write. My goal is to make plugins as flexible as possible and possible to reuse them as either stand alone apps or parts of other systems.

buck_rogers

Why would you use osTicket at all? I don't know a nice way to ask that. Do you have lots of tickets already?

poctob

Good question. We selected it as a ticket management system for one of my companies a while back and it was meeting all of our needs. We never looked at the code base at that time and it was functioning good enough. As we grew, we needed more functionality from OSTicket and started modifying it writing plugins. Yes, we do have a lot of historical data, but not like we wouldn't be able to migrate it from to another system.You brought up a good point. We should evaluate other systems and see if they can meet our needs.

buck_rogers

Well, as with all things you never know much about any software until you start fiddling with it. I've seen things that are Open Source and paid that you might think the same things. It really depends on how much you want to customize. If it works, who cares? (well, until it breaks, then you care). I hate saying it like that because I do care, but in reality if it works it works and the users do not care. It solves a problem. But I know what you mean. I looked at a lot of stuff, but osTicket seemed to be used by a lot of people, so I went with it. Seems to work well.