Upcoming Events
San Francisco CiviCRM Meetup - February 8th, 2012
February 8th, 2012
Come meet others from the Bay Area who are interested in, using or developing (more...)
UK usergroup - London meetup
February 8th, 2012
Come and meet others from the UK that are using CiviCRM or are interested in (more...)
Chicago CiviCRM Meetup
February 17th, 2012
Please join other CiviCRM users, administrators, and developers in the Chicago (more...)
London user and administrator training
February 23rd, 2012
A comprehensive two day hands on training course covering the configuration, (more...)
CiviCRM Seminar - London
February 23rd, 2012
NfP Services free seminar
CiviCRM London sprint Feb 2012
February 27th, 2012
Following the CiviCRM training here in London, we will have a CiviCRM code (more...)
Philadelphia - CiviCRM Meetup for Q1 2012
March 13th, 2012
UK South West - CiviCRM Meetup
March 20th, 2012
Come meet others from the Area who are interested in, using or developing for (more...)
[Bristol, UK] user and administrator training
March 21st, 2012
A comprehensive hands on training course covering the configuration, (more...)
San Francisco user and administrator training
March 29th, 2012
A comprehensive two day hands on training course covering the configuration, (more...)
CiviCRM Usability, Test and Code Sprint - San Francisco (March 2012)
March 29th, 2012
This usability, code and test sprint is targeted at CiviCRM users and (more...)
CiviCon 2012 San Francisco Bay Area - April 2nd 2012
April 2nd, 2012
CiviCon is THE annual event bringing together the people who use, develop, (more...)
CiviCRM Documentation, Test and Code Sprint - after CiviCon San Francisco (April 2012)
April 4th, 2012
This sprint is targeted at CiviCRM users and developers who want to work on (more...)
CiviCRM Components
Tools for engaging your supporters...
Fixing the "Greetings" feature
- Not Just a Contact Database
-
These optional components give you more power to connect and engage your supporters.
civiCASE
Case management for clients and constituents.
civiCONTRIBUTE
Online fundraising and donor management.
civiEVENT
Online event registration and participant tracking.
civiMEMBER
Online signup and membership management.
civiMAIL
Personalized email blasts and newsletters.
civiREPORT
Report generation and template management.
Greetings and Salutations :-)
As some of you may already know, the existing "Greeting Type" feature in CiviCRM is pretty broken. You can't use it to specify a greeting for either email or printed / postal communications (no token or export support). In addition, as described in Tony Guzman's recent blog on Better Household Management - it's not designed to support a number of key use cases.
So... Tony and the folks at Dharmatech have been working with us to figure out a flexible WORKING solution which can handle the simple cases ("Dear Dave") as well as the more complex cases ("Dear Dave and Bob", "The Honorable Scout Conberg", etc.). If you haven't read Tony's blog yet - start with the Greetings and Salutations section there. Then, if this is an issue that affects you - check out the details of the proposed implementation in the issue tracker.
Address Sharing
Tony's blog also raised the issue of extending address sharing beyond the current "Use Household Address" feature. It makes sense to us to generalize this - allowing sharing between any contact types. I've filed a draft specification here to get the ball rolling on this. However, this work won't make it into the 2.3 release - unless some other developer(s) step up to take it on.
Please add your comments / suggestions for either specification here.
Comments
Chers Dave et Tony, ....
Hi,
I don't think the above described option handles "non english" languages. For instance, in french, you write the greeting differently if this is a male (Cher Robert) or female (Chère Anna).
In german the prefix/title is important (Herr Doktor Schuman, Frau Doktorin Meyer) too.
Basically, to avoid the clumsy Cher(e) {firstname} or avoid having a custom greeting for all of the non english contacts, you need to introduce tests.
What about having custom functions one can call as a token ? eg {function.GermanGreeting (firstname,lastname,jobtitle,prefix)}
that will compute the right way of addressing the person.
BTW, could also be useful even in english, eg. to have custom message based on a value, for intance write a different sentence if the contact has a phone number recorded or not)
What do you think ?
X+
Good use cases ...
You'll be able to create any number of options for the Greetings "drop-down" - and include any of the contact tokens in those choices. I think this should provide pretty complete support for things like gender differentiated greetings. For example, user can select:
- Cher {contact.first_name} for male contacts
- Chère {contact.first_name} for female contacts
... or
{contact.individual_prefix} {contact.job_title} {contact.last_name} for the German example
and they can enter a completely custom string for the exception situations.
greeting hooks?
I think xaviers suggestion is to also make the custom greeting hookable so folks can use logic to customize the greeting (since thats what a language like german makes you do)
lobo
Hooked up indeed
Yes,
and if I have to choose the salutation type on a per contact, it puts the user in charge of choosing Chère when choosing Female. That's asking them to do something the system should do for them, not that they do for the system.
Beside, and I'm probably being an edge case, but the salutation is ideally not based on the contact, but on the mailing language as well. We do write to the same contact in different languages. When there is a planned mailing, we have the time to translate the document to the national language, when that's an alert, that's sent in english for instance.
Don't have any idea of the complexity, but if I can have a {function.customGreating1(contact.first_name,contact.last_name,contact.gender)}
and have a php file where I can put a
function customGreating1($first,$last$gender) {}
I'm quite sure even the most wicked case is covered, and you're able to write custom message based on the group, the tag, the third custom field on the left and the captain's age...
X+
Supplemental issue added
After lunch discussion w/ lobo :-)
CRM-4600
Caveat - we're up to our eyeballs in 2.3 issues, so this might get pushed to 2.4 unless you are able to jump in and take it on.
Thanks Dave for helping move
Thanks Dave for helping move this functionality forward. I think it will be a great improvement to greetings but also better allow organizations to not use the Household contact type if they don't need it. Speaking of which, here is the issue that proposes making the household and organization contact types optional in case people are interested: http://issues.civicrm.org/jira/browse/CRM-4566
Tony
Congratulations on Salutations!
It is fantastic to see the effort that has gone into thinking this through. There are lots of people who will appreciate this development!
(PS - I think HH are important and could work well in our use cases if they were a special contact type that only had one location to which you can easily add individuals who then display the HH address within their profile as a "Household" location)