Installation

Requirements

Craft CMS 5.4 or later
PHP 8.2 or later

There is nothing else. No build step, no vendored JavaScript library, nothing to compile. The front end is one plain script and one plain stylesheet. Pigeon is optional, and CSR detects it at runtime.

Install

composer require justinholtweb/craft-csr
php craft plugin/install csr

Or search for CSR in the Plugin Store.

What installing gives you

The help centre works as soon as the install finishes:

Five ticket statuses: New, Open, Waiting on customer, Resolved and Closed. New is where tickets land.
Four categories: Getting Started, Account & Billing, Troubleshooting, and Frequently Asked Questions. Rename them. They are shared by articles and tickets, so what you file an article under is also what somebody picks when they write in.
Article URLs at /kb: every site gets the URI format kb/{slug}, with the index at /kb.
A support form at /support, and a page at /support/ticket where customers read and reply to their own tickets.

If the project config you are applying already holds CSR's statuses and site settings, as it does when you deploy from another environment, the install does not seed them again. Seeding on top would create duplicates with different UIDs on every environment.

Editions

Edition	Price	What you get
Lite	Free	A working help centre and support desk. No caps on articles, categories or tickets.
Pro	$99, then $79/year	Measurement and scale: failed-search and deflection reports, SLAs, teams, canned replies, custom form questions and more.

Lite is a working support desk, not a demo. A company with one person answering the email never meets a paywall. Pro covers the things that only start to matter once one person can't read everything.

	Lite	Pro
Articles, categories, tickets	Unlimited	Unlimited
Help centre, search, ratings	●	●
Suggestions before the form	●	●
Ticket statuses	5	Unlimited
Top searches	●	●
Failed and abandoned searches		●
Article performance and feedback		●
Desk reports: volume, response times, workload		●
Deflection reporting		●
SLAs, opening hours, escalation		●
Canned replies		●
Teams and routing		●
Custom form questions		●
Restricted articles		●
Satisfaction survey, merging, export		●

Lite also keeps 30 days of search history, whatever the retention setting says. That covers "what happened this month", which is the question the top-searches report answers.

Going back from Pro to Lite is a downgrade, not a lockout. Existing tickets keep their statuses and every status you created is kept. Lite only stops you creating a sixth.

First run

Rename the categories under CSR → Categories. Turn off Tickets can be filed under it on any category that should hold articles only.
Check the URLs under CSR → Settings → Sites. Each site has an article URI format and the address of its help centre index. See Configuration.
Add fields to articles under CSR → Settings → Article fields. The body of an article is your own fields, so add a CKEditor or Matrix field before you write anything.
Say who hears about new tickets under CSR → Settings → Notifications. With nobody listed and nobody assigned, CSR has no one to tell, and it logs a warning instead.
Write an article, and fill in Also found by with the words customers actually use.
Open /support in a private window, type a subject line, and watch your article get suggested before you can send the message.

Scheduled tasks

Put the SLA sweep on a schedule if you use service levels (Pro):

*/5 * * * * php /path/to/craft csr/sla/check

A ticket turns red in the control panel as soon as it goes past its deadline, because that is checked every time the ticket is read. The sweep does the work nobody is watching the screen for: recording the breach so reports can count it, emailing the desk, and escalating. It is safe to run as often as you like. A breach is recorded once and emailed once.

CSR's other housekeeping runs during Craft's garbage collection: closing resolved tickets, applying retention periods, and marking abandoned suggestion sessions. The console commands in Usage let you schedule those at a fixed time instead.

CSR sends email through the queue by default. Make sure your queue is running, whether that's Craft's web-triggered runner or a php craft queue/listen daemon.