Having previously been a programmer myself, I can attest to very real and maddening phenomenon that affects nearly everyone in this line of work: the urge to rewrite. It comes on hard and fast, usually immediately after finishing a piece of software. Sometimes it even comes on smack in the middle of your efforts.

The reason is simple: as you go through the process of writing the code, you gain new perspectives on the shortcomings of your original approach to the problem. It’s the same thing that happens when we look back on the events of our past and think “if I only knew then what I know now…” In a way, the better the software that you’ve written turned out, the better your perspective becomes, and therefore the more pernicious the urge to rewrite it becomes.

A great example of this is our own Knowledge Management software. It’s a great piece of software that’s very highly regarded in the industry, and an awful lot of people tell us how much they enjoy using it. We could very easily add on to the existing code base, adding new features and improving existing ones, and release a new version and make a ton of money. But it wouldn’t be as good as we know that we could make it. Because now we’ve been working with the product for years, supporting it, using it on our own site; we know too much about it now; we know what its potential is.

So what are we doing now? Rewriting the whole damn thing from scratch. And it’s going to be great. It’ll be a lot faster, more flexible, and have lots of little touches that would’ve been too difficult to work into the old framework.

Of course, like anything, there has to be balance. You can’t rewrite a product every day or even every year and still remain profitable. At some point you have to recognize that no matter how much potential you see, only a certain amount of that potential is realizable in the immediate future. No matter how good a piece of web software becomes, there will always be room for improvement. The better a piece of software gets, in fact, the more strongly it advocates for the shifting of its own paradigm. You’re always climbing into view of the next incredible set of previously unthinkable goals.

The art of software development is in recognizing when you’ve found a nice plateau, and then allowing yourself to rest there for a while. That way you have room for some horizontal growth–feature enhancements, optimizations–and this give you and your clients time to enjoy all the hard work and creativity that’s gone into the software’s current iteration.

New Help Desk is out, and since it has a 2.61 mark on it, you can expect a couple of improvements. We have added a lot of new features, and of course, fixed all current bugs that were out there.

First of all, I’m pleased to announce that Help Desk administration has gotten a mobile version for access through PDA devices. From now on, admins can point their cell phone browsers to /Help Desk/admin/mobile in order to use it on-the-go.

We added additional checks for displaying posts submitted via email in HTML format, since there was a chance for them to be harmful for admins (with malicious scripts embedded). Also, from now on, all the images will be removed for display in admin zone, with an option to show them (per post setting). Malicious scripts are just removed. An important improvement is that we now store incoming email addresses for posts submitted via email, so everybody can see what email address the client used in correspondence for the post in question.

In this release, we have added an Options dropdown to the Closed Tickets page. Now you can perform all of those same operations on closed/resolved tickets too. While viewing a ticket, other ticket’s IDs inside of a post are now transformed into links. View Ticket page has also gotten a much needed Change Status drop-down for fast status switching. The same drop-down has been added to Add Ticket page too. Now admin can set proper status while he is opening a ticket, it doesn’t have to be “Unviewed” anymore. Spam page will show every ticket’s spam probability count. And on startup page, you will see yourself online too, since you apparently are.

User manipulation is also enhanced. User’s status can be changed now (active/unactive). Newly registered users can get linked to old tickets they submitted prior to registration if the emails are the same. Also, since admin can approve users now, when they approve someone, they will get an email that uses an account_created.txt template.

Furthermore, we have abandoned our old horizontal menu on the top navigation bar. We have replaced it with a better menu which you will find much more usable than the old one.

Public side also got a couple of handy improvements. Logged in users can now search their tickets on a Ticket Lookup page. Announcements can also be searched now, by anyone. By the way, from this version on, Announcements will be in HTML, and admins can use KB’s HTML editor to edit announcements.

We have also added some things to make Help Desk more customizable. We have added more encoding types for language strings. Besides old “8bit”, now you can use other ones too (7bit, base64, quoted-printable). Templates got their improved {ttdate} (soon to be called “acpdate”) modifier to properly format the date. We have added a default date/time format in General Settings page, and you can change it in your templates to correspond to your language/design settings.

By the way, from now on, as soon as you upload new files in order to upgrade Help Desk, your installation will cease to work. It will ask you to run updater if it notices that your installation database does not correspond to the new files.

We are currently in the planning stages for the next large update of Email Marketing, version 4.2. This new update will include a number of important updates in regards to our email template system and the ability to add plug ins and custom coding into any of the admin pages.

Some of the items to be likely included in 4.2 are listed in our development tracker.

If you have any feature requests or issues you would like addressed please post them to the bug tracker or forum in the near future to have them considered for 4.2.

Due to the extensive scope of changes and additions we are not setting a date for this update at this time.