Installation FAQ

Install, Setup, & Customize

Installation

Quality Control is installed just like any other WordPress theme. Check out WordPress's "Using Themes" to learn how.

Setup

Once the theme has been installed, it is important to take a few minutes to properly setup the theme. This will ensure that all features are used properly.

1. Creating States

   States (or statuses) act just like Categories. In the WordPress Admin area, find the "States" SubPanel. Add as many states as you would like. Some recommended ones are things like New, Open, Resolved, Hold, etc.

2. Creating Milestones

   Milestones are created just like states. Find the "Milestones" SubPanel and follow the same instructions as above. Some recommended Milestones are things like 0.1, 0.2, etc.

3. "Create a Ticket" Page

   In order to allow users to submit tickets via the front-end of your site, a Custom Page needs to be created. On the "Add New" SubPanel of "Pages", create a new page with a title of "Create a Ticket," or something of the like. Then on the right hand side, under "Page Attributes," select "Create Ticket" as the "Template." More about Page Templates.

Now that some basic content has been added, it's time to head over to the Quality Control-specific Settings. In the "Settings" panel, find the "Quality Control" SubPanel. This screen allows you to customize how the theme functions, and looks.

1. General Settings

   These settings are pretty straight forward. Fill them out with the new content you just created.

2. Status Colors

   This area allows you to set custom colors for each of the states you created earlier. Using Hex codes, you can customize the background color, and the text color of the status badge.

Customization

The basic install of Quality Control is pretty cool—but it was created so you can make it even cooler. Customization requires a fair bit of PHP and WordPress knowledge. A personal philosophy of mine (and it seems to be that of WordPress as well,) is that only a select number of core features should be implemented, and the rest left to 3rd Party plugins, hacks, etc.

Child Themes! They are the only way you should make modifications to the theme. Hopefully I've done a good enough job so this is feasable. Think of this theme like you do core files in WordPress. In order to allow for easy upgrades, you know you shouldn't make any changes to the core files. The same goes for themes. By using Child Themes, you can make indirect changes to the theme, and still be able to seamlessly update.

Allowing Guest Ticket Creation

By deafult, only users with the capability publish_post can create a ticket. Roles and Capabilitie. To change this, we just need to override a function in the parent theme. In the child themes's functions.php, put the following:

function quality_ticket_creation_cap()
{
        return true;
}

This means ANYONE can post a ticket. To set specific permissions, you can do something like this:

function quality_ticket_creation_cap()
{       
        if( current_user_can( 'read' ) )
                return true;
                
        return false;
}

This means that anyone who is registered can create a ticket. They can be the lowest level, Subscriber, and still create a ticket.

Further Customization

There are many hooks throughout the theme, allowing you to create your own taxonomies, remove taxonomies, and pretty much do anything you would like. Really you just need to explore.

Further Support

Since this is a free theme, I can't garuntee support; however, I will try my best to help you out. Feel free to me, or email me at [spencerfinnell (at) gmail (dot) com]. Or try the Support Forum