I think that you would be able to quickly implement this change yourself. Something like this ought to do the trick.

edit /include/template.inc.php

circa line 56 locate:

function getName(){

return $this->ht;

}

and change it to:

function getName(){

$names = explode(' ',$this->ht);

return $names;

}

note: this is untested, but it should give you an idea of how and where.

I'm not a PHP guru, so I may need a bit more hand holding.

This is what I am trying to do, please let me know if your code changes will achieve this?

1. when customer fills out a ticket, it will ask them for First Name and Last name (the current form just says Full Name)

2. when we (support) respond to the customer request, we want to use First Name as the salutation, not full name.

So today OST out of the box sends emails that look like:

Dave Smith,

Thank you for submitting a ticket...

We would like our emails to say:

Dave,

Thank you for submitting a ticket...

Thanks in advance for your help.

Mark

It will still ask them for name.

however it should make it so that when it displays the name it will only display first name.

I disagree. I think we should keep the full-name field, because tickets created via email cannot have a first-name and last-name field.

What I think we need is a nice splitting mechanism, so in the email templates and page templates, you could use

Hi %{ticket.name.first},

for instance