Sidebar Webhook asynchronously injects HTML from your server into conversation sidebars.
This screenshot shows what it does: you can load any content on a per-customer, per-message basis from your own web server, asynchronously, every time a conversation is loaded on the screen.
In this picture, the kittens and text were loaded from an external server based on the customer's email address.
- Directly link to your customer management system
- Show details about order status live from your fulfillment system
- Quickly ship changes to your FreeScout system UI without updating modules
- Connect to backends using PHP/Node.js/Ruby/Perl/Rust/Go/Bash/Haskell and even Java
These instructions assume you installed FreeScout using the recommended process, the "one-click install" or the "interactive installation bash-script", and you are viewing this page using a macOS or Ubuntu system.
Other installations are possible, but not supported here.
- Download the latest release of FreeScout Sidebar Webhook.
- Unzip the file locally.
- Copy the folder into your server using SFTP. (ℹ️ Folder is renamed in this process.)
scp -r ~/Downloads/freescout-sidebar-webhook root@freescout.example.com:/var/www/html/Modules/SidebarWebhook/ - SSH into the server and update permissions on that folder.
chown -r www-data:www-data /var/www/html/Modules/SidebarWebhook/
- Access your admin modules page like https://freescout.example.com/modules/list.
- Find Sidebar Webhook and click ACTIVATE.
- Configure the webhook URL in the mailbox settings. The webhook secret is optional and will be sent as part of the payload if set.
- After everything works, purchase a license code by sending USD 10 at https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/fulldecent/10usd
Your webhook server will receive a POST request with this kind of JSON body:
{
"conversationSubject": "Testing this sidebar",
"conversationType": "Phone",
"customerEmail": "hello@example.com",
"customerPhones": [{
"n": "",
"type": 1,
"value": ""
}],
"mailboxId": 1,
"secret": "0C7DA918-E72C-47B2-923B-0C5BB6A6104E"
}Your webhook server shall respond with content to be injected into the sidebar. The document should be a complete, well-formed HTML document like so:
<html>
<body>
<h1>Hello world</h1>
</body>
</html>You can optionally set a title in the document and it will be used as the panel title in the sidebar:
<html>
<head>
<title>My panel title</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Hello world</h1>
</body>
</html>Setting CORS headers is not required, as the document is requested by the FreeScout server (not by the user's browser).
Our goal is to have a very simple module to allow vast extensibility in the conversation sidebar.
Anything that makes it simpler (removes unneded code) or more extensible for most people (adding a couple post parameters in boot()) will be a welcome improvement.
Hints
-
Class "Modules\SidebarWebhook\Providers\SidebarWebhookServiceProvider" not found
Did you rename the folder as per step 3?
If something is not working, please try these steps so we can see what's wrong.
- Update FreeScout to the latest version (even if the new version doesn't have any relevant changes, the process of updating can sometimes fix problems that would prevent freescout-sidebar-webhook from running).
- Use
chown -rto ensure the module has the same owner/permissions as other files in your FreeScout installation. - Try to disable and reenable freescout-sidebare-webhook from your system/modules page.
- To confirm the module file is actually activated and readable you might add a line like this above the
private const MODULE_NAMEline. The code to add is:file_put_contents("/tmp/sidebartmp", "is running");And then you can confirm it is running by seeing if that file is created when you load the page. - Next check for system logs. It will be helpful to note any warnings, errors or notices as they may instruct where the problem is coming from.
- Check your PHP version, is it a version supported by FreeScout?
After you have checked all these things, please create an issue and detail how you tried each of these steps.
- This project was inspired by Sidebar API.