Over the past few years the administration menu has grown quite a bit. Although I use it quite often, I find that I'm sometimes unsure where to look for a particular configuration option. We've heard the same comments  from both experienced and new users - so Xavier Dutoit and I thought it would be a good idea to take a stab at re-working the menu structure. The goals of the re-organization are:

Several CiviCRM users have expressed an interest in managing CiviCRM activities with a smooth, interactive calendar screen.  Since calendaring can be a complex topic, we've put together a basic, working calendar to facilitate discussion.  The prototype resembles the calendar included in other relationship-management tools:

For all you "customizers" out there - I wanted to highlight a cool new feature that is available as of the 3.4.3 / 4.0.3 release. You can now append jQuery functions, Smarty code, HTML (really anything) to any template without having to create a customized copy of the entire file. Wow - you say, "how the h?!# do I do that?"

All you need to do is put your "extra stuff" in a new file and save it as template_to_append_to.extra.tpl.

The staff at Denver DataMan have identified CiviCRM as the CRM that we believe is best suited for making a truly robust CRM that will be accessible for the blind. We have received funding from the Colorado Center for the Blind to allow us to support the development of this innovative project.

I figured you'd be as worked up about this as I have been - but rest easy friend-o, 'cause we've got some good medicine coming your way.

Hi all,

For the training in london, we wanted a simple example that illustrates how to customise and improve civicrm for specific usages using the ajax interface. I'm sharing the result with you, hoping you will find it useful.

One common workflow we have is to change the status of an activity from "scheduled" to "complete". The default way is to click on edit, go to the full form, change the status, save, and go back to the list of activities

We are going to improve it with a "one click click complete": on the list of activities, we transform the status column into an action (when "scheduled"), and when I click on it, it changes it to Completed, without changing screen. For that, we are using the ajax interface and the activity api. Copy the template templates/CRM/Activity/Selector/Activity.tpl into your override directory, and add a few lines of jQuery at the top:

{literal}
<script>
  jQuery(function ($){
    $("td.crm-activity-status_1")
    .attr("title","Change the status to completed")
    .css("cursor","pointer")
    .click (function () {
      aid=$(this).parent("tr").attr('id');
      var activity_id = aid.replace("crm-activity_", "");
      cj().crmAPI ('activity','update',{id:activity_id,status_id:2}, 
       {callBack: function(result,settings){
          if (result.is_error == 1) {
            $(settings.msgbox)
            .addClass('msgnok')
            .html(result.error_message);
            return false;
          } else {
            $('#crm-activity_'+activity_id)
            .removeClass('status-overdue')
            .find('td.crm-activity-status_1')
            .removeClass('crm-activity-status_1')
            .addClass('crm-activity-status_2')
            .html("Completed"); 
          }
        }
       });
    });
  });
</script>
{/literal}

Oh, it's magic! What does it do in detail ? Well, you should attend a developer training, you will discover it, and way more ;)

X+

Relationship are a natural way of storing relations between contacts. However, it doesn't work so well if you have several hundreds of related contacts as the realationship tab becomes unreadable quite quickly.

One of our client needed to associate each individual in their base to a local branch (we implemented a nice geo lookup based on the postal code to identify the local branch, but that's another story). It means that each local branch has 1000th of individuals. This could happen in other situations, for instance to keep a relationship between a "main teacher" and each pupil or who is the latest volunteer that contacted each person in a GOTV/ Canvassing campaign...

DGG and I have been discussing a small modification to the Contact page that we think will have a nice impact on usability for people who spend a lot of time working inside of the contact record. After some thought, we decided that it makes sense to move the edit/dashboard/vCard and "Create activity" buttons up and outside of the Summary tab. We'd like to change the "Create Activity" dropdown into an "Add ..." dropdown that could include contributions, activities, cases, memberships, relationships and notes.

In the course of the recent NYC Developer camp, I had the opportunity to discuss the state of CiviCRM's templating system with members of the core team .  In the course of our work with CiviCRM we have done extensive theming and have discovered a number of opportunities for improvement over the current system. In this post I will outline a quick overview of the current state of affairs, and then I'll move on to a broad overview of the changes we would like to see and then specific goals for the 3.1 release.