A couple of weeks back I wrote here some thoughts about letting users manage and modify their own private collection of reports without actually having site-wide "administer reports" privileges. I've since gone ahead and written up the code to make this happen, and I would love to get feedback from the community on its usefulness and ways to improve it.

A client of mine at NS Web Solutions is looking to solve a problem involving the way their users need to handle reports.  I think this might be common enough to be relevant for others, so here's a bit about what we're planning to do.

Note: This is based on a short forum thread here: http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,22307.msg93500.html

Key features

Note: You can see videos of these features in action on NS Web Solutions' case study page for this project.

Update: Some of the code for these features is available on GitHub. See my comment below.

CiviCRM offers an incredible set of features straight out of the box. At NS Web Solutions we're sometimes asked to provide a CRM system with some pretty unique features, and we've found that by relying on CiviCRM's wide array of hooks and customization features, there's a lot that can be done.

This has come up a couple of times before. According to my chat with Lobo today, not much is happening on this front. Since our client at Two Mice and a Strawberry has a need for this, we're diving in head first this week. Hopefully we'll have something that's worth contributing to core. Please comment below if you have any thoughts on the ideas presented here.

At Two Mice and a Strawberry, a client has asked for some customization of the Notes features for Contacts. It happens that these features may also be useful for other objects that use Notes, but at the moment we are primarily interested in getting this working for Contacts.

In the CiviCRM forum, I had a short exchange with Lobo about the two primary improvements we're looking at:

As of now (version 3.1.5), CiviCRM limits finding and merging of duplicate records to users with the "Administer CiviCRM" permission. A recent thread on the forums points out that some organizations will want to allow that privilege to non-administrative users. Having a need for this myself, I'm looking for the best way to do it. If a reasonable solution can be found, I'm hoping the changes will make it into core at some point in the future.

Originally posted at TwoMiceAndAStrawberry.com.

I recently had to modify CiviCRM to support a specific use case for a client. In this project I needed to allow the user to enter anything in the Individual Prefix field, rather than choosing from a list of options. The client in this case was very sensitive about presenting the individual's honorific precisely as the individual wants, so that "Dr.," "Rev. Dr.," and "Most Rt. Rev. Dr." should all be possible, along with anything else the user might want to enter.