Site preferences in v1.8

One of the requested features in the recent past has been the ability to hide certain sections of various forms at the site level and the ability to modify this at a user level. I committed code that does this at the site level earlier this week. The issue is described as Site and User Level UI Configuration options (phase 1) in our issue tracker. A related issue is Add a config option to set which fields should appear in the address form. For v1.8 we have implemented site level preferences only. User level preferences will be implemented in a later version, but the database schema and code has been designed to make user level preferences a fairly easy addition. The screens which can be customized include: Contact View, Contact Create / Edit, Advanced Search, User Dashboard and the Address fields. It was a pleasant surprise to see that most of the work was at the configuration level to store/retrieve the options selected. Tailoring the screens to observe the set options was fairly easy for all the above cases. This feature also enables us to start moving "preferences" from the config object into a preference table. The config object is loaded for each page request, and thus a heavy config object takes more time to load. Site preferences are loaded on a as-needed basis only. Thus we hope to reduce the size of the config object significantly over the next few releases. These options can be set/reset from the Global Setting Page under System Preferences and Address menu items. I suspect this feature will be quite popular with a few of our users :)