Helpdesk

Helpdesk (justflows.helpdesk) is the official support desk plugin, built and maintained by the Justflows team. Customers open tickets on your site and staff answer them from the Helpdesk item in the admin sidebar. A ticket is private unless the customer chooses otherwise, and a handover moves it to another agent straight away. The Justflows Cloud help center runs on it.

Install and set up#

1. 1

   Install and activate

   Admin → Marketplace → Helpdesk → Install, then Activate. Activation creates the Helpdesk tables and publishes the support pages.

2. 2

   Check the support pages

   Open /support on your site. The request form, My tickets, Public tickets, and the confirmation page are ordinary pages in your theme, so edit them in the page builder like any other page.

3. 3

   Choose who can ask for help

   Helpdesk → Settings sets guest and signed-in tickets, who may make a ticket public, file uploads, retention, the ticket number prefix (such as SUP-1042), and the support popup.

4. 4

   Add your team

   Give staff the Support agent role, or grant Helpdesk capabilities to existing roles (see Staff access). Then set up categories, canned replies, and SLA targets on the Desk tab.

Support pages and blocks#

Activation publishes these pages with editable blocks and matching patterns. They are kept out of shared caches. The Beacon theme is made for help centers and styles the Helpdesk forms and ticket pages.

Blocks: New ticket, My tickets, Public tickets, Ticket, Find a request, Request sent, Open support (opens the popup), and Order help and Product question, which start a ticket about one Shop order or product. Account pages can start a ticket for an order too.

The staff inbox#

Opening Helpdesk shows Reports: ticket counts, open and unassigned tickets, tickets past their target, first-response time (median and 90th percentile), satisfaction, the last two weeks, and the shop contact rate, with a CSV export. Inbox, Customers, Desk, and Network are the other tabs.

• Inbox applies saved views, refreshes while it is open, and sets status, priority, assignee, or tag on several tickets at once, or closes them.
• On a ticket, staff reply, add internal notes, @mention colleagues, close and reopen it, and change its status, priority, type, visibility, category, subject, and assignee. A reply draft is kept on the ticket. Tickets can be merged, split, linked, or saved as an article, and files can be dropped on a reply. Each ticket has its own address: /admin/plugins/justflows.helpdesk/tickets/<id>.
• Handover reassigns a ticket immediately and requires an internal note for the next agent. Settings can also email the customer when it happens.
• Suggest reply drafts an answer with the site's assistant. Encrypted message text is left out of the draft.
• Desk holds categories, teams, canned replies (which can also set status, priority, and tag), saved views, custom fields, SLA targets, and automations. Status names can be renamed, and a custom label can map onto a base status. Each agent chooses which emails they get there, including a daily digest.

Service levels and automation#

• SLA targets count business hours and pause while a ticket is pending or on hold. Breaching a response target emails the assignee.
• Assignment can be round-robin, fewest open tickets, or by language.
• Automations remind customers who have gone quiet, raise new tickets nobody has touched, and send mail. They also emit justflows.helpdesk.ticket.* events that other plugins can listen for.
• Email notices go out for a new ticket, a reply, an assignment, a handover, a solved ticket, a pending reminder, and an @mention. Customers can stop reminder mail.
• Inbound mail. Reply mail carries a token, so an emailed reply lands on the right ticket. When JUSTFLOWS_INBOUND_MAIL_SECRET is set, mail posted to POST /api/mail/inbound opens a ticket, or adds a reply when the subject names one. Quoted history is left off the thread.

Customers and guests#

• Signed-in customers see their requests under My tickets. Guests open a ticket with their name and email and get a private link by email; only a hash of its token is stored. Find a request sends a fresh link.
• Guests can confirm their email, and close, reopen, or rate their own request. If they later sign in with the same verified email, they keep their tickets.
• Customers can attach files. Uploads are type-checked, executables are refused, JPEG metadata is removed, and the files are stored privately.
• Public tickets accept one +1 per signed-in member. Before a reply is published, staff can mask an exact string in it.

Privacy and security#

• Private by default. Settings decide whether customers may make a ticket public, only staff can, or every ticket stays private.
• Sensitive replies are encrypted when JUSTFLOWS_HELPDESK_KEK holds a 32-byte key (hex or base64). Only staff with helpdesk.secrets:reveal can reveal one, each reveal is recorded, and the nightly job destroys expired secrets.
• Retention. Closed tickets can be removed after a set number of months. Deleting the plugin with Remove all data also removes its tickets, files, and support pages.
• Abuse limits. Blocked email domains and a limit on open tickets per customer refuse requests early. CAPTCHA can guard a new ticket, a reply, Find a request, and the popup; the provider itself is set under Settings → Discussion → Spam protection.

Support popup#

A Support button on public pages opens a popup that searches public answers and can send a short request. The greeting is one line for each language the site has turned on, and the button follows the language of the page. The popup can be limited to certain paths and placed in the bottom-right or bottom-left corner.

Shop orders on tickets#

With Shop active, a ticket lists that customer's orders with their number, status, total, items, and tracking. On a multisite installation the list includes orders from every active site in the same workspace, even a shop on another hostname. The order stays on the site that took it, and its number opens it in Shop there. Guests can look up an order by number and email, and a failed payment can open a ticket.

Multisite and the platform desk#

On the installation's main site, the Network tab lists tickets from the other sites. A site can escalate a ticket to the platform desk, and the main site can write an internal note back. The main site can show its Support button in every other site's admin, share its popup with sites that have not set their own, and send both to another site that answers support for the network.

Staff access#

The Support agent role holds read, reply, and assign, without any other site access. Administrators have every capability. See Users and roles.

API and agent tools#

Helpdesk's routes are under /api/helpdesk/ (/ext/justflows.helpdesk/ also works). Staff routes check a Helpdesk capability; the portal/* routes serve customers and check that the ticket is theirs. The core actions are offered to AI agents as MCP tools: helpdesk_tickets_list, helpdesk_ticket_get, helpdesk_ticket_create, helpdesk_ticket_update, helpdesk_ticket_reply, helpdesk_ticket_assign, helpdesk_ticket_handover, helpdesk_ticket_merge, helpdesk_ticket_set_visibility, helpdesk_canned_responses_list, and helpdesk_reports_get. Each is listed only to sessions that hold its capability.

Diagnostics and limits#

Helpdesk publishes checks for storage, encryption, and site availability, and failures show under Admin → System → Diagnostics. Usage meters under justflows.helpdesk.*, including guest tickets, let a platform set limits per site; with no limit set they are unlimited. When the monthly ticket limit is reached, Helpdesk either accepts and flags new tickets or refuses them, as you choose.

Known limits#

• Helpdesk is in beta, so expect changes before 1.0.
• The network inbox is read-only and opens only from the main site.
• The assignee list shows the agents who have opened Helpdesk, not every user.
• Email notices are sent with the plugin's default text. Their templates appear in the email editor, but edits there are not used yet.