Support

We have frozen the development of Akeeba Ticket System 4 for Joomla 3. We are currently most of the way ready with Akeeba Ticket System 5 for Joomla 4.

One of the major changes we have implemented in ATS5 is the removal of our own implementation of custom fields and the integration of Joomla custom fields. Do note that our custom fields predated Joomla's custom fields by several years, it's not like we had decided to reinvent the wheel.

This means that you will be able to use any kind of custom field available to Joomla, core or third party. The URL field does exist as a core Joomla field, for example. Instead of a clumsy separator you will be able to define field groups, each one with a label and optional description. The new ticket and edit ticket forms will display the field group labels and descriptions. In fact, each field group appears in its own visual zone, by default with an all–around border, making it clearer which fields are encompassed in the group. This will make longer, more complex forms easier to handle.

As for migration from the old versions of Akeeba Ticket System we do have a plan: if there's a custom field with the same name (alias) as the old ATS 4–era custom fields its value will be kept intact. This reduces the migration burden to creating fields under the same names as the ones you were using before and field groups to contain them in a way that makes sense for your use case. As luck would have it, my development to–do list for today is implementing this migration :)

So, both of the features you are asking for are something we have already implemented in ATS 5 by virtue of using Joomla custom fields instead of our own implementation.