Lighthouse Pro e-mail support
RobW recently commented on my blog that he had encountered some problems getting Lighthouse Pro's e-mail support system working. This one feature is in itself one of the best features of Lighthouse Pro, in my humble opinion. Having your end-user mail in a support request is always better than entering all bugs and enhancements in the LHP administrator console.
Assuming you have LHP installed and your project is already setup, it is just a matter of setting the right values. Under the Admin Menu in the Administrative console, select the Projects link. Select the project you are working with to edit the project's properties. Now it is just a matter of filling in the blanks to enable the e-mail support. Below is an example of a project with the e-mail support enabled:
As the form states, some e-mail servers require the full e-mail address as the username. This is generally required on hosted e-mail where one server services multiple domains. In the example, a user would send an e-mail to bugs@yourdomain.com and when you open LHP administrator it will check that e-mail address and import any message in the mailbox as an issue.
If you wanted to make it really simple for your users, just make form for an error description and use the cfmail tag to send it to your bug report e-mail address. I use this system on most of my projects and the only real complaint I have with it is sometimes my users tend to forget that is is a bug report/enhancement request system and use it to send me messages. Needless to say, I had to sit everyone down, explain the proper usage of the system and no more problems. From the user end anyway, I wish I could say the same about my applications. ;)
Well, that is about all there is to it. Any other comments and suggestions are welcome, I am by no means a self-proclaimed expert at LHP so I may have missed something. I hope this helps you out, Rob.
Well LHP is smart. If you tell it that the email address is C@foo.com, it will check the account, and any mail addressed to A or B will be ignored.
This means that if you have a lot of projects, you can create one email account for them and use multiple aliases.
[...header code...]
<cfparam name="form.Email" default="shanez@kisdigital.com">
<cfparam name="form.ErrorDescription" default="">
<cfset errorList="">
<cfif structKeyExists(form,"posted") AND Len(form.ErrorDescription) gt 0>
<cfmail to="bugs@kisdigital.com" from="#form.Email#" subject="Error Report/Feature Request" type="text/plain">
#form.ErrorDescription#
</cfmail>
Your support request has been sent.
</cfif>
<cfif structKeyExists(form,"posted") AND Len(form.ErrorDescription) is 0>
<cfif Len(form.ErrorDescription) is 0>
<cfset errorList="You must enter a description<br/>">
</cfif>
</cfif>
<cfif not structKeyExists(form,"posted") OR len(errorList)>
<cfoutput>
<cfif Len(errorList)>
<font style="color:red;">#ErrorList#</font>
<br/>
</cfif>
<form action="#CGI.SCRIPT_NAME#" method="post">
<input type="hidden" name="posted" value="1">
<input type="hidden" name="Email" value="#request.rsUser.Email#">
<textarea name="ErrorDescription" cols="60" rows="10">#form.ErrorDescription#</textarea><br/>
<input type="submit" value="Report Bug/Enhancement">
</form>
</cfoutput>
</cfif>
[...footer code...]
@Ray: I did not realize we could alias the e-mail addresses, but it makes sense. Thanks for the tip!
@Ray - I didn't enter any sort of support request, it wasn't a bug issue,
more of a figuring out how to do it issue (probably PEBCAK).
including the POP3 service not running and the password having expired,
but I got it working.
Thanks again for the inspriation.