WP Support Bubble – A Simple Support Form For Your Customers

This is a plugin built to scratch my own itch, providing an unobtrusive way for customers to contact me and request help with my plugins.

And the implementation is quite straightforward too, a simple widget, fixed to the bottom right of the screen, that opens a popup with a minimal contact form inside. It’s down there right now if you want to check it out.

Of course, it also has a few nifty features that you can use to make it your own:

• Configure the email recipient for support requests.
• Optionally show the website admin user’s avatar.
• Add your own custom message before the support request form.
• Optionally hide the name and email fields for logged-in users.
• Built-in anti-spam honeypot.

When a user sends their support request you’ll receive an email with all of their information and details of the page they sent their request from. So in my case, I’ll see which plugin post they were looking at.

Installation & Use

• Upload and activate the WP Support Bubble plugin.
• At this point the plugin will be enabled sitewide with the default configuration.
• Visit Settings > WP Support Bubble to enter your license key, and configure the plugin to your liking.

Developer Notes

As well as the features available through the plugin’s settings page, there are a number of others that can be unlocked through your functions.php file, including:

• The ability to use conditionals to load the support bubble only on certain pages, categories, or posts with the wp_support_bubble_show filter.
• Updating the text used for labels and placeholders in the support request form, and the success and failure messages with the wp_support_bubble_strings filter.
• Overriding the default avatar size, set to 40 pixels by default, with the wp_support_bubble_avatar_size filter.
• Allow for more complex scenarios by overriding the email recipient, even after setting in the plugin options, with the wp_support_bubble_email_recipient filter.
• Overriding the email subject line with the wp_support_bubble_email_subject filter.

Conditionally Loading WP Support Bubble

On this website I only want to show the WP Support Bubble on the plugins category, or on single posts in the plugins category, which is accomplished with the following code snippet:

1add_filter( 'wp_support_bubble_show', 'ampersand_show_support_bubble' );
2/**
3 * Be specific about where to show the support bubble.
4 *
5 * @return bool
6 */
7function ampersand_show_support_bubble() {
8    return is_category( 'plugins' ) || in_category( 'plugins' );
9}

Please Note

It’s important to be aware that this plugin’s successful use depends on your web server’s ability to send email reliably, and that isn’t something I can control.

This plugin takes the form inputs from the WP Support Bubble and packages them up into an email, sent using the default WordPress method, wp_mail. There’s no backup of what was sent (yet!) and it isn’t recorded anywhere.