HelpDesk/Tickets, an easier way to communicate for staff & members

"All moderators are capeable of seeing the questions, though they should be the only ones and the member itself."
It is like that. Did you test? When you login as member1/2 you can't get access to other nodes than submitted by that member itself.

"I think this should have certain content acces levels since, I dont want anybody else then the user to read the help issue for example."

In my example access is managed on different levels:

1. "access control" - permissions based on content/module, though often lacking the NEEDED permission in this case it would be "VIEW TICKETS" (but there is only a generel ACCESS CONTENT permisssion)
==> only the Create Permission is useful on this level for new node types!!! Because I don't need no editing of tickets by the user, so I choose only "create cck-tickets" permission on this level and the access content.

2. "taxonomy access control" - manages the permission by the node's taxonomy. Because every user has create permissions but only mod/admin have view permissions AND the tickets are ALWAYS in this taxonomy based on ther REQUIRED category field when submitting tickets, that's because members can't view tickets

3. Because mod/admins don't have node administration permission they can't see unpublished notes.

4. "view own" (don't mess it up with "EDIT own") seems a basic permission that works in this constellation - i think this is because of the access content grant - though I had problems with this, sometimes it worked sometimes not, I couldn't trace the reason, yet. There is a possible problem, depending on the when and how tax access module uses some node module hooks to set permissions. But I am not sure...

5. field permissions, not used yet, but they will be useful to give tickets more attributes which will only be needed by certain users e.g. mods/admins to manage ticket status and the anonymous user to have an field to enter an e-mail address for the answer.

Maybe someone could tell me where is the best place to contribute this "package" once it's ready... ?

I already have got this feedback from you: "Great work I really like this. Only please have a submit button, instead of a preview."
This is one of the drawbacks: This depend on the global post setting "Preview post: Optional/Required", I had set this to required. I also think that for tickets its better, but in general someone may want to manage this by node type. But this is a drupal core issue I think.

I think that the power of my approach is, that only using widely spread and good supported modules (in fact beside from core functionality to this point you only need cck + taxonomy access control), with further development of these modules and the drupal core, also the helpdesk will gain new features.

Cheers

schnizZzzzZzzla

Actually there is so much left to do until on the node and Views level everything works perfectly, so I didn't concern myself with mails yet. At this point mails to anonymous have to be sent manually with external mail.
Of course it is appreciated that HelpDesk manages also the mail workflow, but HelpDesk's aim is basically to avoid mails as far as possible. If we take mails into it, we need a far more complex system to receive mails. This is very important, because once a user receives a support email in most cases just clicks answer button and now we have a problem. If we didn't assign the mail somethin like an ID in the subject we can recognize later on the re:-subject or we don't have some good logic to connect an email answer to the original email, we will loose all benefits of the Ticket System and have to mess with some mixed system, where we have to assign some messages to the original case manually... Big companies pay a lot of money to manage this by big mail systems like KANA...

But I am sure everything is possible, nothing stops drupal ;-)
So, all help is appreciated, everybody who's interested in joining a workgroup to discuss the HelpDesk and to spend some time contributing together on a fine project, please contact me:

ICQ: 930 80 207
Skype: dr.rjinswand
FORM: http://drupal.org/user/104093/contact

I am out now, but messenger is on, I will confirm contacts later, feel free to add my to your contacts if you use icq or skype...

I have been told that there is already a project group for this:

http://groups.drupal.org/issue-tracking-and-software-releases

So lets try out if the contributed modules already meet the requirements, because the issue tracking system is already what i called ticket system. If it is possible to make the issues private, it will be better to work on improvements in the above group.

So hold on doing something on the new group, check out the above group and these modules first:

Project Module

and a rewrite of this module

Case Tracker Module

and the following addtional module:

Project issue tracking

You can't prove it won't happen.
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Here is one more additional approach to consider: The Organic Groups module would allow us to restrict access per group. It's probably not the most elegant solution, but I wonder if we could automatically create an Organic Group of one (the user).

For that matter, the Simple Access module would allow us to restrict access by role. I'm assuming, however, that we wouldn't want a role for each individual user who submits a ticket!