Integration of osTicket with WordPress Website

We have been looking for a way to provide a proper customer support to our clients for our website & products. Of course, we wanted to have centralized on-line solution which makes things easier on both sides of a support request.

After looking into the various options available, we decided to use osTicket to provide centralized Ticket Support to our clients. But the problem was that we wanted it to work with our existing website. We wanted it to integrate with our WordPress based website in such a way that the header and footer of the osTicket support page should be same as our website header and footer.

After spending countless hours on internet searching for the ways to integrate osTicket with WordPress Website, We went through the various resources available on the internet, we did the testing but none of them worked as we wanted.

So we thought to write an article on integration of osTicket with WordPress Website to save the time of someone looking for the ways to integrate osTicket with their WordPress website.

WordPress: WordPress is the most popular CMS Platform, it powers lots of corporate websites as well as blogs. ( Current Version : 4.0.1)

OsTicket: osTicket is a widely-used open source support ticket system. osTicket also supports email piping, so customers can submit new support request simply by sending an email and a ticket is generated and ticket number and link are sent back to the customer. Customer can track the responses and progress of his ticket online. So Email piping support was one of the key factors for our decision to go with osTicket. Also being an open source software osTicket is completely FREE..!! ( Current Version : 1.9.4 )

Installation of osTicket: The required server configuration to install osTicket is given on the osTicket Website. But as osTicket is old enough and very popular now so almost every servers supports the installation of osTicket. You can also use one click Auto Installer like Softaculous to install and setup osTicket.

Integration of osTicket with WordPress Website:

After spending countless hours on internet, we came across the three ways to integrate the osTicket with the WordPress Website.

1. Hacking the osTicket files:

To integrate osTicket with your website (WordPress website or any other), you can modify the required file of osTicket. To change the header you can modify the header file of osTicket to match your existing. But once you hack the files of osTicket, you own the codes and so there wont be any community available for you to support.

Also this is not the easy way, you need to have the understanding of osticket architecture and also your website architecture. If you have the website based on WordPress platform, You should have the knowledge of programming language – PHP, and MYSQL for database to edit the files, As both osTicket and Worpress is built using PHP and MYSQL.

2. Using a WordPress Plugin:

If your website is based on WordPress platform, the most easiest way to integrate osTicket with your WordPress website is to use a WordPress plugging. One plugging available to bridge between osTicket and WordPress is Key4ce osTicket Bridge.

As given on the plugging page, this plugging is compatible with the latest version of osTicket 1.9.4 and WordPress Version 4.0.1. Also It Integrates osTicket users with your WordPress users, so users need not have to signup for both WordPress and osTicket. Download Key4ce osTicket Bridge.

3. Using Inline Frame / iframe:

An inline frame is used to embed another document within the current HTML document. As today almost every browsers supports iframe, So you can use it to display your osTicket page with in the WordPress or any other website.

How we have integrated osTicket with our WordPress website:

We wanted a simple solution where customers can send support request by email and a ticket is created and send back to the customer. Customers can track the progress and responses online from a access link sent to him or they can request an access link from our website.

To achieve this we modified some files from the osTicket so that web submission of tickets and other unwanted options are removed from osTicket page and then we used “iframe” to display the page on our website.

NOTE: Currently we are not using osTicket.

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