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Make your life easier with handy presets for your contacts (...and help make this useful extension available for everybody)

Published
2015-05-20 08:15
Written by
mpeth

If you have been working with CiviCRM for a while, you will have noticed that certain patterns occur regularly in your data - and thus have to be entered over and over again.

Consider this: 

  • The prefix "Mr" corresponds to the gender "male", "Mrs" is usually "female" - you know that, but CiviCRM does not, so you have to make an additional entry

  • In languages other than English, you might have the additional hassle of choosing the gender-specific greetings

  • You might also have requirements specific to your organisation - e.g. if you are a faith-based organisation that has contacts with more than 30 different combinations of prefix, formal title, addressee and greetings formats.

​​ ​I'm sure you could come up with more examples from your daily work for data patterns that are common to certain contact segments. Wouldn't it be nice if you could define presets and choose from them when creating a new contact to fill in standard data according to these patterns? It would not only save you work, but also provide for compliance with standards in your organisation (as in our faith-based organisation example above). 

You have already guessed it: We have an extension in the pipeline that does just that. We call these presets "suits", and the extension in development to handle them "CiviSuits". Here is how they work:
 
CiviSuits screenshot
 
By choosing the preset "Bischof" (= German: bishop) from the dropdown menu above the contact creation form, we have just prefilled the Prefix, Title, Email Greeting, Postal Greeting and Addressee fields to make sure we will communicate with this important contact accordingly. The prefilled fields are highlighted so the user can easily see what CiviSuits just did automatically.
 
While a prototype of CiviSuits is already running in test mode for one of our customers, we think this extension can be useful for many CiviCRM users. But it needs some additional funding to be prepared for public release! For example, to make the extension configurable easily we need to add a settings interface. 
 
By the way, the possible use cases of CiviSuits are not limited to the above-mentioned scenarios. Future functionality might include for example:
  • searching for contacts that match or don't match a preset to clean up and standardize your data
  • applying presets also to other entities than contacts

​If you are interested in funding the further development and public release of CiviSuits or would like to know more about what it can do and how it can help you, please get in touch with us (info<at>systopia.de).

 

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Comments

Great extension! And the same could be achieved with the CiviRules extension but then without doing that in the UI. Anyway great work!