Blogs tagged "Make it happen"

Two aspects of CiviCRM’s broad roadmap involve improving the user interface and adopting a flexible form builder, both of which are well underway. In some cases, there’s overlap in the end product in that work on one or the other results in an overall better user experience. That’s the case with work that’s currently underway that addresses CiviCRM’s export interface.

By applying some of what the Core Team has already been working on with respect to Form Builder, we’ve been able to overhaul the export interface such that it’s significantly more flexible, allowing users to reorder fields with ease. The work has been funded graciously by the Wikimedia Foundation who’s been keen to address both UI improvements as well as flexibility in the form layer.

The new export interface will ship as an extension, though at a...

How can we find a user-friendly way of creating templates for serial letters and other mass communication? Is it possible to integrate CiviCRM with open-source online applications to facilitate the creation of office templates for our users?

This has been bothering us for some time, because many of our users find it hard to set up and work with templates in HTML format. So we started a proof of concept to check possible options… and we found an answer!

After the server version of libreoffice unfortunately turned out to be unsuitable, we found a feasible solution using the open-source office suite ONLYOFFICE, and created an extension to plug it into CiviCRM.

In a first draft version of the extension “onlyoffice”, you will be able to ….

• Install ONLYOFFICE on a CiviCRM server and use its comprehensive functionality for document management.
• Display files created with ONLYOFFICE in CiviCRM
...

The Civi Summit was a great event - full of lots of nice surprises. One that stands out for me was that what started out as some wishful thinking - namely having the ability to provide on-page tours/tutorials - ended up with us being able to beta test a 'proof of concept' before we left.

While some amongst us (ahem) were sampling the whiskey and fine IPAs late in the evening along to the strumming of the musically-able folk, others remained focussed on their laptops - and in Coleman's case this meant getting us a working prototype of a tour/tutorial system for civi pages.

This will give us all the ability to create user guidance on the screen, with settings to determine which Group members get which tutorials, whether they can skip/defer and come back to them later, multi-language/translation options and lots more.

You will even be able to daisy-chain your tutorials together so a new user can take themselves on a very quick but comprehensive tour of the many...

Last month I made a proposal for a client to integrate CiviCRM with Outlook 365. This proposal was rejected because the client did not go for an e-mail migration to Outlook 365. So the need for this plugin was gone.

The plan was that this integration would do the following:

• all the contacts in CiviCRM exposed to the outlook address book
• all the groups and the group membership exposed as groups in the outlook address book
• above would be done with the restriction that you can only see the contacts and groups which you are allowed to see when you login into CiviCRM
• outlook address book is read only. Meaning that changes should be made in CiviCRM and become visible in outlook

I made a guesstimate that development including testing and documentation takes between 12-24 hours of development.
My own investment would be that I need probably 8-16 hours of learning before I can develop a plugin...