five the ACCORD5 company blog

This post may be a little late but I wanted to make sure the news reached all of our supporters!  Trellis Desk 2.0 has gone open source under the GPL.

Get more information and see what's ahead for ACCORD5!

DJ Tarazona
Project Lead, Trellis Des

Hello fellow Trellis Desk users!

Trellis Desk v2.0 Alpha 4 is now available for download and testing.  This release brings plenty of backend coding changes along with a couple new nifty features.  One of particular interest is the new ticket tracker which keeps track of which tickets and replies you've read.  Similar to forum-style topic tracking.

Please keep in mind that this is an unsupported early alpha release. The software is expected to have bugs and is not ready for live / production use. Please continue to use the stable v1.0.4 release in your production environments.

Now to address another matter.  Many of you have probably noticed that our activity hasn't been exactly off-the-charts lately.  I'd like to take this opportunity to give you a more behind-the-scenes look at the development of Trellis Desk.

I, DJ, am the only developer working on Trellis Desk.  It has been this way since Trellis Desk was born.  Well, of course there is Aaron who designs the UI / skins and he does an amazing job!  I'm currently a student attending a 4-year university studying Software Engineering.  As much as I wish I could, I cannot dedicate full-time working hours to Trellis Desk.  I do take school as my top priority.  Therefore when I get bogged down with a bunch of class work, Trellis Desk development hits a couple speed bumps.  I also have to make some money for living and school expenses.  This usually involves freelance work, which unfortunately takes time away from Trellis Desk.

I am telling you this because I want you to know who is behind the Trellis Desk project.  This isn't meant to scare anyone.  Trellis Desk development is not ceasing.  In fact, it will be increasing over the next few months as my school load is lighter this semester.  And when school gets out for the summer, you bet I'll have much more time to pump out releases.  In addition, we have received some funding that will allow me to focus more on Trellis Desk rather than freelance work.

I greatly appreciate the continued support and patience.  Trellis Desk 2 is definitely going to be a major upgrade over v1 and I already have some exciting plans for v2.1.  Also, I'm going to try to follow more of a time-based release schedule.  Starting with this alpha release, I'll do my best to make a release every 2-3 weeks.

If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to post in our forums or the comments.  Thanks!

DJ Tarazona
Project Lead, Trellis Desk

For those not following our forums or @TrellisDesk, Alpha 3 of Trellis Desk 2.0 was released last night. Please keep in mind that this is an unsupported early alpha release. The software is expected to have bugs and is not ready for live / production use. Please continue to use the stable v1.0.4 release in your production environments.

Be sure to check out the multiple attachments for tickets in the ACP. :)

DJ Tarazona
Project Lead, Trellis Desk

Photo copyright of our own @ryanpboyle on Flickr

Hello Trellis Desk fans,

I do not have a Trellis Desk 2.0 Alpha 3 announcement to make, but I will bring you up to speed with the latest Trellis Desk development.

TD2 is still progressing along smoothly.  Not as quickly as I had hoped, but that all will change in about three weeks.  For those of you who are unaware, I am a software engineering student.  School does take up a lot of my time, and what I have left I dedicate to Trellis Desk.  In a few weeks, my Spring quarter will be completed.  This means I will be able to dedicate my efforts to working on Trellis Desk full time.

What can you expect in the next several weeks?  Keep an eye out for Alpha 3.  I am hard at work implementing multiple attachments as well as attachments for news, comments, and knowledge base articles.  Once I am out of school, development will noticeably increase.  TD2 will hit Alpha 3 and possibly 4.  Then we will move into the Betas which should be stable enough for early adopters to test in production environments.  We have some exciting news in the pipeline for the Summer.  Stay tuned!

Thanks for your continued support!

DJ Tarazona
Project Lead, Trellis Desk

Trellis Desk 1.0.3 brings along a few bug fixes only.  Nothing too exciting, but we want to keep your experience as bug-free as possible.  If you find any bugs or security vulnerabilities, please report them to our Trac.

TD2 Alpha 2 is a major step from Alpha 1.  I'm quite excited about this release because we are moving quickly to a fully functional help desk system again.  There are a few areas that need to be completed for Alpha 3, such as languages and skin management, attachments, statistics and reports, etc; but most of the areas are complete.  I'm very happy with the way ticket management turned out.  The ticket filters work great, and now you can filter by flags, assigned tickets, and unassigned tickets.

Email notifications are now complete and fully support HTML emails.  TD2 offers many more notification types (ticket assigned, moved, escalated, put on hold, etc) and staff users can each choose which type of notifications they would like to receive.  Administrators can globally disable specific notification types in the notification settings.  Even better, staff users can each choose if they would like receive notifications for only tickets assigned to themselves, tickets assigned to other staff, and/or unassigned tickets.

The knowledge base now has permissions for each category.  I recall a request for an "internal" knowledge base that only staff could access.  Now all you have to do is create a category and only allow your staff groups to access it.  Staff can fully manage and view articles (as well as news / announcements) from within the ACP, unlike Trellis Desk 1.0 where you have to use the user-side to view articles and edit / delete comments.

The new anti-spam system has been completed.  It allows the use of Akismet, PhpCatpcha, or reCAPTCHA.  Sub groups are now supported.  You can have a user be a member of multiple groups and their permissions will be merged (a permission granting access takes priority).  The ability to hide staff names from the user is now built-in.  This is a per group setting.  When enabled, the user will see the group name rather than the staff username.

So there you have a little preview of some of the features Trellis Desk 2 has to offer.  For more information as well as a download link, read our forum post.  As always, please remember that Trellis Desk 2 is in its alpha stages.  That means any TD2 releases are unsupported and expected to have bugs. These releases are not ready for live / production use.  However, I encourage you to download Alpha 2 and help out with testing.

DJ Tarazona
Project Lead, Trellis Desk

Just in case you haven't been watching our forums or Trellis Desk twitter account, Alpha 1 of Trellis Desk 2.0 is now available. Please keep in mind that this is an unsupported early alpha release. The software is expected to have bugs and is not ready for live / production use. Please continue to use the stable v1.0.2 release in your production environments.

DJ Tarazona
Project Lead, Trellis Desk

Hey guys.  So we know that things have been pretty quiet regarding Trellis Desk 2.0 and we're here to set things straight.

Yes, Trellis Desk 2.0 is still in active development.  Indeed, the development pace has been moving slower than we anticipated, but we are still working on the project.  As a student in college, earning my degree and school work comes first — my education will only help improve Trellis Desk.  I admit I have under-estimated my work load and took on difficult classes last quarter; but now my classes are lighter and should remain that way for quarters to come.

At this point, I am working on the client side of TD2, and then I will move to the installer.  After that, an Alpha release should be available for testing.  We are not releasing an ETA, but you can keep on eye on the Trac.  I'll have an Alpha 1 milestone roadmap available soon.  Be sure to also follow @ACCORD5 and @TrellisDesk for further updates.

Thanks for your continued support!

DJ Tarazona
Project Lead, Trellis Desk

Hello Trellis Desk users,

We know a lot of you are eagerly awaiting Trellis Desk 2.0.  An alpha release is expected within the next 3 weeks.  We apologize for the prolonged development, however things are moving along steady (even if slightly slower than we had hoped).  The wait will be worth it.  In the meantime, check out this preview screencast.

I apologize for the quality.  It's the best Vimeo would do with a free account.  If you want to stream / download the original screencast, you can do so here (you'll need a fast internet connection for streaming, and the resolution / video size is pretty big).

Enjoy!

DJ Tarazona
Project Lead, Trellis Desk