As requested, we’ve finally put a development blog back into action! For a project with 6 years of history, it’s going to look pretty empty around here in blog land for a couple days.

Here’s a quick update to get the things rolling:

Cerberus Helpdesk 4.0 progress is in full-swing, with daily feedback coming in through e-mail, live chat and posts on the community forums.

The major functionality we’re currently working on is:

• Translations/Localization
• Custom Fields
• Improved Mail Rules (header rules)

We’ve finally updated the design of the project website. The old site served us well for years, but it was starting to show its age. The new site aims to keep things simple, since Cerberus Helpdesk is best experienced by jumping right in with the demos, instant evaluations or downloads.

The new project website is especially interesting because it’s completely driven by Cerberus Helpdesk 4.0 and Devblocks as a “community tool” — no different than the Support Center or Knowledgebase. This lets us do some pretty powerful things with very little work required, like giving you an all-encompassing “Fetch & Retrieve” search box to simultaneously look for answers in the forums, roadmap, changelog, wiki documentation, knowledgebase/faq and this blog.

We recently added a live chat option to the new site. Currently we’re using LivePerson – ideally we’d already be using the Cerberus LiveHelp project that over 1,200 of you are interested in. We’re making a lot of notes about how we can better integrate live chat with the helpdesk.

You’ll also notice we’ve removed our old store in favor of simple Paypal purchase options. We were never thrilled with having to maintain a storefront just to let you guys buy licenses – it really overcomplicated things. There’s also no reason we needed to store your credit card information (or even ask for it). If you dislike Paypal for any reason, we’re still able to take care of you with our merchant account for Visa/Mastercard and AMEX. We still accept checks, wires and corporate purchase orders too.

On the project roadmap end of things, I recently wrote a (fairly tongue-in-cheek) post over on my personal blog about the things that have been nagging me about the project portal, where we accept feature requests and bug reports. We could really make it a lot simpler for you guys to leave feedback and help collaboratively drive the project roadmap – voting on what you want to see done first and having an easy way to be notified when they’re done. The current system is too developer-centric.

We’ll make a new habit of summarizing anything interesting going on throughout the community here on the blog. Make sure you subscribe to our RSS feed to stay aware of project news – upgrade announcements, security notices and the occasional request for comment regarding the community’s thoughts on new functionality.

-Jeff