The Contact Us tool was developed as a way to try to direct user queries to the appropriate team or a relevant web site.
The central admin team were getting fed up with receiving emails from students complaining about site content, eg, broken links to websites, spelling mistakes in PDFs, ambiguous questions in a test and so on.
These questions need directing to the site owner or teacher of the course (or to anybody with site update permission unless they have hidden themselves via Preferences in My Workspace).
The contact us has 4 boxes each covering a different aspect:
1/ "Problem with content?"
2/ "How do I do this?"
3/ "I've hit a bug / technical issue"
4/ "Feature suggestion"
Each box can be disabled in the properties file, so if you don't want users to suggest new features, you can remove the box.
Box 1 takes its contacts from the membership of the current site.
Boxes 2 & 3 are assigned a single email address: if the property 'feedback.technicalAddress' is not set then the 'mail.support' property is used.
Box 4 expects a URL specified by the property 'feedback.featureSuggestionUrl'.
This 5 minute video may explain more: https://screencast.com/t/ctJKW7iFI
The contact us tool sends an email containing all known relevant info automatically included (eg, site URL, username, browser and version, plugins installed) see: https://blogs.it.ox.ac.uk/adamweblearn/2016/04/the-contact-us-tool/
The Contact Us tool is intended to be added to every site in much the same way as the Help tool
- it is placed just above the help tool. It is intended to replicate the "Contact Us" facility you may see on Google or other websites.
The code builds as a webapp which you can drop straight into your tomcat. To configure the tool, set these properties in your sakai.properties or local.properties.
feedback.featureSuggestionUrl
feedback.helpPagesUrl
feedback.supplementaryInfo
The address to which technical feedback and queries will be sent if mail.support is not appropriate.
feedback.technicalAddress
Examples:
feedback.featureSuggestionUrl=https://sakaifeature.myinstitution.ac.uk
feedback.helpPagesUrl=https://sakaihelp.myinstitution.ac.uk
feedback.supplementaryInfo=This is a chunk of really helpful \
supplementary information. Enjoy!
[email protected]
If you have configured Recaptcha in your Sakai, Feedback will use it to validate unauthenticated technical feedback reports, ie, when non-logged in users use the Feedback tool.
To backfill existing sites to have the Feedback Tool, you need to run a quartz job to add the tool to all the sites. There is a Job called "Backfill tool into sites" which when run can add a specific tool (e.g., 'sakai.feedback' for the Contact Us tool) to all sites that match a particular type.
You can configure your installation so that it is not possible to go into Site Info -> Tool Order and hide the Contact us tool or change its title, by adding the following lines in your sakai.properties (or if the property key is already there, by updating the value):
# Make sure the feedback tool can't be hidden or edited
poh.uneditables=sakai.feedback
poh.unhideables=sakai.feedback
The way the Contact Us tool works by default is that, when you are creating a new site, when you get to the 'Site Tools' page where you can choose the tools to include on the new site, the Contact Us tool is automatically ticked and greyed out (like the Site Info tool). To turn off this feature so that the tool is not ticked or greyed out by default, you need to remove the words "required=true" in 2 places from the 'toolOrder.xml' file in the kernel module.
The feedback tool is written using a mixture of Java, Javascript and Handlebars templates. A servlet (FeedbackServlet.java) and JSP page (bootstrap.jsp) are used to initialise the page shell with Javascript variables. Javascript then takes over and renders templates into the shell when a link is clicked. Forms are submitted to an EntityProvider (FeedbackEntityProvider.java) and that provider does the emailing. Some protection against DDoS attacks is provided by an optional Recaptcha integration. There's a template for every page although they are all compiled from WEB-INF/templates into templates/all.handlebars. One download with all the templates compiled to JS.
To compile the templates use handlebars.js
npm install -g handlebars
The precompile step is available through the plugin
mvn3 install -P templates