CiviCampaign - Making it easier to configure

Published
2011-08-25 04:02
Written by

If you are running Drupal, the process of configuring CiviCampaign will be a lot easier with the 3.4.6 release. The CiviCRM Engage Drupal module has always provided an xml configuration file which, if imported, setup many default custom fields designed to make CiviCampaign really shine. Previously, the process for importing it required looking up your site key, the absolute unix path to an xml file on the server, and your Drupal username and password. These pieces had to then be combined into an extraordinarily long and error-prone URL which you had to place into your browser. And, you also had to create several contact subtypes and fiddle with several other CiviCRM configuration settings. Now - all of these steps are done automatically by simply enabling the Civicrm Engage module from within Drupal. Furthermore, Eileen has exposed a number of ways to configure the behavior of the Walklist and Phonelist reports in the upcoming release - including the ability to:

  • specify how to group the results
  • leave people off the list if they have made a donation within a given period of time
  • format the reports differently, e.g. specify rows per grouping and pagination options

These changes will make CiviCampaign something more easily accessible to users of all skill levels.

Comments

I had briefly looked into this module as a possible way to run our school's phoneathon, where we call up past donors and ask if they would like to continue their support. I quickly gave up on it though because of all the extraneous requirements -- it wanted me to create subtypes that are irrelevant to us, create custom fields I don't want, reconfigure our addresses to enable walkists we would never use... it seemed like a lot of stuff to tack on to our database. Are there any plans to make it more modular so we could, say, just use the phone features and not have to restucture our addresses and use the walklists too?