Want Help? Come get some!

I’ve grown tired of doing support via blog comments or emails, so it’s time for a change. Introducing HELP! my new BuddyPress powered support site. You can now get support for all my WordPress plugins and themes, plus Hahlo, nextga.me (once its finished.…) and other projects all in one spot.

In the past I’ve had trouble finding a “good” solution for support. I’ve tried various forum packages, with each being abandoned because they were either insufficient or superfluous to my needs… that and every forum I’ve run has been hit by low-life spammers selling v1agr4 or offering to transfer $99,000,000,000 to me from their Nigerian bank account.

Following these ‘failures’ I tried hosted solutions like GetSatisfaction and UserVoice, again they didn’t really meet my needs, and I found that I was still left fielding support questions in blog comments and via email. In the case of support for Hahlo I stuck pretty strongly to GetSatisfaction (even if I didn’t check it as often as I probably should have). Recently GetSatisfaction have announced changes to their pricing plans, which ultimately means the free account (which I’ve been using) would appear that its losing a bunch of the more useful features. I should clarify that this change isn’t the only reason I’m moving away from GetSatisfaction, the main reason is that I wanted something I had more control over, and that I could also use for supporting my WordPress Plugins and Themes etc.

Enter BuddyPress

Then I started reading about BuddyPress following its 1.2 release. I’d played the really early beta releases and liked the idea, I just didn’t like the requirement that it needed WordPressMU to run. Well, that’s been solved with v1.2, and its great. Adding bbPress forums (which was what I really wanted) into your BuddyPress setup is also mind-bogglingly simple, and a heck of a lot less painful than it was in previous releases. The new default theme for BuddyPRess ain’t too shabby either. But, I digress, this isn’t a BuddyPress review.

So I’ve settled (for the time being) on BuddyPress for my support “solution”, and I’ve spent the last week or so fiddling around, tweaking (more than I’d originally planned) the default theme to match this blog, adding a custom homepage, and making a few plugins work the way I wanted. The important plugins were the ones I was going to use to let people signup/login, I didn’t want to force people to create *another* account, so I’ve added support for Facebook Connect, Twitter oAuth and Open ID. The plugins I’ve used needed a little tweaking to get working as I wanted, mainly the Twitter one which I needed to write a new filter for in order to get the avatars working (I might release this filter as a plugin for a plugin…)

So, here’s the deal

From here on, the place to get support will be help.deanjrobinson.com, please don’t leave anymore questions as comments on random posts, or send them via email — its time to try and centralise and control this a bit better.

To begin with I’ve set up ‘groups’ for Hahlo, and each of the plugins and theme that are available on this site, and I’ll probably add a couple of more general ‘groups’ at some point for css and javascript questions which aren’t directly related to one of the other projects.

So, if you’ve emailed me recently, or left a comment and I haven’t replied that’s probably why, but your can now jump over to help.deanjrobinson.com and start asking your questions.

…and there a few rules, but in general just don’t be a dick and you’ll be fine, remember I’m providing this support for free so keep that in mind. If you want to be a dick, that’s fine too, I’ll just ban you.