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Show HN: Deskulu – Opensource knowledgebase and ticketing system

by farhadhf on 6/15/16, 2:30 PM with 27 comments

• by reitanqild on 6/15/16, 4:20 PM

  Nice work and thanks for sharing! And don't care about the PHP haters here.

  For those who wants to go with hosted anyway, I'd recommend looking into Freshdesk instead of Zendesk.

  Some reasons:

  * Free tier up to three users

  * Cheaper licenses once you leave the free tier. (IIRC)

  * More features included by default in the free and lowest tiers. (IIRC)

  Just be aware that a friendly Indian (or so I think) will call to try to upsell you : )

• by SwellJoe on 6/15/16, 10:09 PM

  Our current ticket tracker is Project Issue (the same one used by Drupal.org, sort of, though they seem to still be running a custom version). I dislike it a lot, and it was a tremendous pain in the ass to migrate from the Drupal 6 version to the Drupal 7 version. I'm hesitant to invest any more time in Drupal-based solutions to things because of how painful our D6 to D7 migration has been and how buggy and incomplete almost every module we use has been. (And, with most developers now focusing on Drupal 8, I don't expect any of these problems to ever get fixed in Drupal 7.)

  But, this looks really nice, and since I'm stuck with Drupal for the foreseeable future (I can't afford to stop everything to do another migration at this point), I will likely look into how difficult migrating our tickets from Project Issue would be. I don't suppose there's already a migration for that?

  Also, using a third party for notifications as you're doing is problematic; probably even a deal breaker, for us. Though, I understand the desire to not use Drupal notifications, as they're among the most broken parts of the system and have a clumsy API and very weak solutions to common things like bounce processing and mailed replies.

  Finally, I'm super impressed by how fast some experienced Drupal folks can whip something up. I struggle for days or weeks to do anything with it. It's such a large system, and it always seems to take so much code to do even basic stuff (and forms API in Drupal is deeply ugly and verbose). That's my roundabout away of congratulating you for making something awesome in a very short amount of time.

  Edit: You mention forums as a feature of this. Is that the standard Drupal forum module or something else?

• by codegeek on 6/15/16, 6:57 PM

  "Need a Mandrill account"

  You may want to rethink this one as Mandrill screwed their customers big time recently. So I hope there is a way to add other services like sendgrid, mailgun etc.

• by cyphar on 6/15/16, 9:50 PM

  +1 for GPLv2. Would you consider making it "GPLv2 or later", as well as including the three-paragraph statement of the license in all of the source files?

• by ocdtrekkie on 6/15/16, 2:48 PM

  Any reason this shouldn't have straight up SMTP support built in? Was looking at an internal use for this right up until I noticed that requirement.

• by sarreph on 6/15/16, 3:43 PM

  Great work! With such high per-agent pricing tiers on mainstream platforms such as osTicket and ZenDesk, this looks like a great alternative for startups and small teams :)

• by xxdesmus on 6/15/16, 3:46 PM

  You lost me at: "Deskulu is an opensource helpdesk and ticketing system based on Drupal 7..."

• by mahdiponline on 6/15/16, 3:03 PM

  Awesome. Thank you.

• by behnamakradi on 6/15/16, 7:10 PM

  Good