The Quality Control theme is a free WordPress theme that you can use as a ticketing or support system. It was developed by Spencer Finnell.

Here’s a screenshot of the live demo below.

In this post, I’ll be going over how to set up the theme so you can set up your own ticketing, support, bug squashing, whatever site all within WordPress.

Setting It Up

Installing the theme is very straightforward. Download the theme, upload it to your /wp-content/themes/ directory and activate, just like any other theme. After doing this with a fresh WordPress installation, you should have something like the following.

It’s looking a little sparse though, so let’s focus on adding some content now.

New Type of Content

One of the first things you’ll notice in the WordPress admin panel is that you can’t add “Posts” anymore. Instead, it has been replaced with “Tickets.”

This is a custom post type, so make sure you’re running at least WordPress 3 or you’re probably going to get a bunch of errors.

Adding Tickets

The “Add New Ticket” page is not much different from other post types, with a couple new additions. Under the category and tag boxes are two new taxonomies: Status and Milestone.

These are currently blank so I’ll go back to add some from the Quality Control demo site.

States: Aborted, Hold, New, Open, Resolved
Milestones: .1, .1.1, .1.2, .1.3, .1.4

Quality Control Settings

After installing the theme, you’ll see a new link under your “Settings” menu which allows you to set a few self-explanatory options.

• Create Ticket Page – This is the page you set with the “Create Ticket” page template. We’ll get to this part later.
• Default Status – The state that is selected by default on new tickets. I’d suggest something like “New.”
• Completed/Resolved Ticket – Like the above setting, but once a ticket is resolved.
• Status Colors – Using hex codes, you can assign different colors to the different states to differentiate them.

As for the “Status Colors” settings, there is no fancy color picker thing, so you’re on your own finding hex codes to customize the colors. If you use Firefox, I’d recommend the ColorZilla addon.

Create Ticket Page Template

To allow visitors to create tickets from the front-end you need to create a new page and select the “Create Ticket” page template, like so.

After creating this page, you have the option of going back to the “Quality Control Settings” page and selecting the page you just made for the Create Ticket Page setting.

This will insert a link to this page on the right of the main navigation menu (which also includes Recent Tickets, States, Milestones, etc.)

Conclusion

This is probably one of the most innovative WordPress themes I’ve seen lately, free or paid. It has a number of obvious uses including a support system and bug tracker. Best of all, it uses WordPress.

What do you think of the Quality Control theme? Do you plan on using this for your own projects? Can you think of any other non-obvious uses for it? Let me know in the comments.

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2. Guzel Magazine WordPress Theme Review
3. Icey Blue WordPress Theme Review

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