[Advice Needed]

Hello all, I'm a student trying to become an application developer. Right now I'm doing an internship at a company which uses nopCommerce version 3.60. My assignment is to make a page where logged in users can fill in a form (their name, e-mail and a message) and post this. After the user has posted this successfully a site admin will get assigned to this message and will receive a e-mail about a new post. When the admin logs in they can respond to the message, view the history of the message (if there has been more messages before this one) and answer on this page itself (kind of like a private conversation most forums have).

Now my question is: What would probably the best way to implement something like this? Should I be looking into plugins and try to understand them or should I start somewhere else? I've installed nopCommerce 3.60 locally and experimented a bit with it but it's a bigger project then I've ever worked in before and it's all kind of coming at me at once. I did look at the documentation already, mostly at the Developers guide -> Creating a nopCommerce plugin but I'm still not sure if this would be the best way to start out for me.

Thanks in advance,
Joost

EDIT: Oops, posted thread before I made up a topic title and I can't change it

Can we sticky this thread?

It seems like customer service. There are several plugins for that...


https://www.nopcommerce.com/marketplace.aspx?searchterm=ticket&version=33

I'd suggest that you've already got what you need.
The current system allows for admins to interact directly with any registered customer through the admin panel via Private Message. If you adjust the contact request form to send the email to a person in your organization, they can easily respond to the customer via the PM system and have the thread saved to the database...

Or maybe the optimal solution would be to extend the current PM functionality to allow registered customers to send a PM from within their account to a designated admin account...there are many developers on the forum that could develop that functionality as a custom or commercial plugin.