Allow Plugin Developers to register plugins with the default Help Widget

[angrybrad]

Created by: Ben Parizek ([email protected]) on 2015/03/12 23:19:32 +0000
Votes at time of UserVoice import: 33

---

As more people have begun using our plugins, we find ourselves having the same conversations over and over. That's fine, and part of the game, but it's hard to swallow when Craft already has some really nice tools in place that solve this for the base platform that could also save us a ton of time and let us focus more on improving our plugins.

The most common questions we ask are "can you send us your database" and "do you see anything in your error logs" and "can you provide an example of your template code so we can see how you are implementing what you are describing", all questions that are very nicely embed in the default Support widget that comes with Craft on the dashboard of every install.

We could write our own little dashboard widget that does the same, but we'd have the additional problem of explaining to everyone where and when to install it, and we'd have to duplicate the code across every plugin we have which would be less than ideal.

The solution? Update the Craft Dashboard Support Widget to allow plugin developers to register their own plugins. This would involve:

1. Allow a plugin to register a support email address
2. If any plugins in the system register a support email address, the dashboard support widget would get a second tab called "Plugin Support" and display a dropdown of options for any supported plugins who have registered a support email address.
3. Let plugin developers tell users to simply "Send us a support ticket from the Dashboard Support Widget and it will include all the info we need"!

Here is a rough sketch of how the dashboard support widget could be updated to support this use case:
http://cl.ly/image/402y2g2s0u0f

And here is an example of how we could register our plugins to appear in the dashboard support widget:
public function registerDashboardSupportEmail()
{
return '[email protected]';
}

Happiness!