Notes from September NYC Meetup: Kyle Jaster on SimplyCivi

At September's meetup Kyle Jaster from Rayogram presented the newly released SimplyCivi Drupal theme, designed as a cleaner, more useful and user-friendly administration theme for CiviCRM. (Also check out Kyle's blog.) Below are notes from his presentation and information on how you can get and contribute to SimplyCivi.

• Rayogram worked to create CiviCRM implementations for each of 62 New York State Senate (NYSS) offices
• extensive use of CiviCase to track assistance to constituents
• much of the work on NYSS implementations went into CiviCRM 3.2 core, especially front end changes
• developed custom Drupal theme to wrap around CiviCRM; provides some extra features that work well with CiviCRM
• decided to rewrap admin theme from NYSS project and make it public on github - can either be git cloned or downloaded as tar.gz
• SimplyCivi theme is CiviCRM 3.2-dependent
• README.txt has all needed info for installation, should be relatively easy; block names correspond with theme region names for easy configuration
• works with CiviCRM Theme Drupal module
• left and righthand sidebar pop out from window sides, but main layout is single column - gives extra width to Civi
• Civi breadcrumbs and full-text search (different from built-in menu bar search, which is just for contacts) are prominent up top
• handy flyout menus from bottom bar - Create New and New Individual; Recent Items actually fly out too, though it's not quite finished yet
• Tabs have been moved into a sidebar, like Vertical Tabs - css broken out into contact-tabs.css, which can be copied into any other Civi theme to make tabs display in vertical sidebar
• messages.css and messages.js functionality also added
• this theme can be a good starting point for learning how to custom theme CiviCRM
• currently no actual CiviCRM template overrides
• SimplyCivi doesn't look good on mobile!
• Rayogram will continue developing and maintaining SimplyCivi theme; others are also welcome to contribute, which is fairly easy via github!