This page outlines a broad roadmap for the CiviCRM Core Team. Near term goals have been set forth in the most recent annual report, and, combined with our roadmap, establish where we will be concentrating our efforts.
At the same time, the CiviCRM roadmap is an invitation for the community to participate in shaping CiviCRM such that it can continue to achieve its mission of providing an amazing CRM to all organizations, regardless of size, budget or focus in order that they can engage their constituents and achieve their mission.
The CiviCRM Core Team revises this roadmap periodically and will likely do so at the next annual Community Summit. For information, please email us at info@civicrm.org.
Goal 1: Form Builder
Form Builder represents a significant leap forward in the flexibility and customizability of CiviCRM, allowing users and administrators full control over the layout of fields on both the admin area and public facing forms. Ambitious enough for you?
Form Builder is well underway, having gone through an initial prototype phase and a first round of funding in 2019. It remains a top priority for the Core Team in 2022. We expect to commit an average of 1/2 developer time per week on the initiative.
More information at https://civicrm.org/form-builder
Goal 2: CiviCRM Standalone
Don't call it a comeback! But yeah, in fact we're planning to bring back support for CiviCRM Standalone. With the addition of both SearchKit and Form Builder, we feel like CiviCRM is well-positioned to offer comparable functionality, in and of itself, with current functionality achieved through the current integrations with Backdrop, Drupal, Joomla and WordPress.
The addition of CiviCRM Standalone is not intended to supplant or otherwise replace current integrations, but rather to open CiviCRM to adoption across a larger ecosystem of website "builders". Likewise, we believe it offers some new opportunities for providers and end users that simply do not want to support both CiviCRM and a content management system.
More details at: https://lab.civicrm.org/dev/core/-/wikis/standalone
Goal 3: UI improvements
CiviCRM is amazingly powerful, but we haven't won many beauty contests lately. Our interface has grown in complexity over the years and some amazing functionality is hidden away or hard to work with. To tackle this, we've established a plan to migrate CiviCRM's user interface to Bootstrap - an increasingly popular framework for designing web-based applications. This migration will:
- provide an easy to maintain, consistent look and easier to navigate interface, putting more of CiviCRM's powerful functionality within easy reach of of our users
- give us a 'mobile friendly' interface that allows our users to work with CiviCRM on the devices of their choosing.
- reduce the learning curve for new users by providing anexperience they'll be familiar with from other web applications
Like Form Builder, work is well underway. Thanks to the efforts of Compucorp, a bridge between the current style and Bootstrap has matured. Dubbed Shoreditch, this new theme has quickly risen as a popular extension within CiviCRM. It's also spawned related UI improvements on WordPress (thanks to the efforts of Christian Wach), Drupal (thansks to MJW Consulting) and Joomla (thanks to Nic Wistreich) worth checking out.
Join us
Today, more than 11,000 organizations use CiviCRM on a daily basis - we want to grow that figure to 100,000 organisations. Key to the growth is increasing the number of people actively participating in our commmunity. The goals you see in this roadmap are designed to contribute to this scaling. We encourage you to get involved. and help us deliver it.
Past Objectives
The following objectives represent completed items and/or items that are at such a state that they've essentially and satisfactorily been achieved. Work may still be ongoing, however they're no longer viewed as a near term objective that we are specifically targetting.
Search & Reporting Overhaul
Dubbed "Search Builder", this initiative is a near term objective that will leverage APIv4 and Form Builder to power an improved search engine and interface, resulting in more flexible, consistent search and reporting capabilities. Seeded by WikiMedia Foundation, Search Builder is in active development. More details can be found online here.
Goal 3: APIv4
CiviCRM has truly benefitted from APIv3, allowing users and devs alike a tremendous amount of flexibility in their work. But, like many things in CiviCRM, it's time for a refresh. APIv4 has shipped in core and will eventually fully replace APIv3, offering improvements in usability, business functionality and increased test coverage.
We recommend that all new developments incorporate APIv4 as the standard. Current intiatives, such as Form Builder, search and reporting overhaul, etc. are leveraging APIv4.
