Help Scout Feedback Widget

This project has been superseded by the embedded form that Help Scout now offers. Please see the new Help Scout Beacon for an easy to use embedded form. Please see the developer documentation for more information.

This library can be considered deprecated and no longer in active development. However, if you've got a bug fix, we'll gladly accept a pull request.

What is this?

This is a self hosted in-app feedback widget for Help Scout. Just give it your credentials and initialize it on your site. No dependencies (yet), and fully extensible.

Usage

Grab the helpscout.js file and add that to your site:

Initialize it with a fake API key and url root:

/**
 * At the moment, Help Scout doesn't allow client-side API requests, so you'll need
 * to create an API proxy that can make requests on your behalf using your private
 * API key.
 */
var scout = new HelpScout({
  apiKey: 'foo',
  getUrl: function() {
    return 'http://my-helpscout-proxy.com/feedback';
  }
});

Great job! Now you can use that scout instance to add feedback widgets to your site, like so:

var supportWidget = scout.init({
  mailboxId: 5488,  // sends to your support mailbox.
  position: 'top-left'
});

var luciferWidget = scout.init({
  mailboxId: 666,  // sends to your lucifer mailbox.
  position: 'bottom-right'
});

They'll all use the same API key, but different chat bubbles will show up on the page which route to different mailboxes. To be honest, there probably isn't much practical use for that yet, but soon!

API

Scout Instance

init scout.init(options) Creates and returns a new widget instance with the given options.

Widget Instance

render widget.render() Manually rerender the widget to it's original state.

show widget.show() Manually open the widget.

hide widget.hide() Manually close the widget.

remove widget.remove() Remove the widget from the DOM.

Proxies

Help Scout does not currently support cross origin JavaScript requests. This widget will instead make a request to a small proxy script on your own server that will then send the request to the Help Scout API. This project includes two sample proxy scripts in the php and rails folders. Please see the README.md in those folders for instructions.

Please note that for the moment, the apiKey set in the JavaScript file is not used by the proxies. These proxies keep the key isolated to the server, and can be set in those files.

More coming soon :]

Screenshots