We just finished testing and now releasing version 1.2, which was announced earlier last week. The main update is ability to create Public Tickets, basically aside of receiving and replying to tickets via email only, now you can create public (or private) support forum using only WPHelpDesk.
From our experience public support forums do not work so well for paid products where user pays for a product or service. When user paid at least $1 for a product he can and should expect some kind of support from the seller, the more personal the better. however the support forums still do have their place in community projects (usually some open source software), where one member of the forum can help a fellow member.
Public tickets, required some changes in shortcodes, we introduced a couple of parameters for each shortcode, to make the tickets list and forms more customizable, the changes are in Shortcodes API are already explained in the updated documentation.
This update is aimed at project like this, we completely redesigned the frontend templates to make them more appealing to users and user friendly, when user is having problem, he can still enjoy great design (this won’t make his problems go away, but still :)).
Additionally we made some updates in tickets import from email and few other minor updates, the redesigned WPHelpDesk version is already on the demo site where you can take a look at it. Soon enough we are planning additional update with even more UI improvments and some new features, stay tooned.