CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I'm delighted to see the new UI improvements in CiviCRM 3.0, including that it adds functionality similar to Drupal's admin_menu module for people using Standalone and Joomla (or Drupal, but not currently using admin_menu).

However, I was a bit surprised by how the CiviCRM menu interacted with the existing Drupal solution. It feels to me that this new setup kinda clashes. And yes, I'm now kicking myself for not getting in and raising this issue before 3.0 went stable

One solution would be to make CiviCRM's menu entries appear as sub-menu items in the Admin Menu. This is what our users are used to from the 2.x series, and it integrates CiviCRM seamlessly with the rest of the menus that users are familiar with. I posted as much in a discussion here back in May when Dave first mentioned that it was on the cards. For some clients, we make heavy use of the Admin Menu module to provide an enhanced UI which integrates client specific facilities, CiviCRM and the rest of the Drupal interface much more thoroughly. While this doesn't give as much weight to the CiviCRM facilities as a dedicated menu, I feel like it would make more intuitive sense to users who currently have access to admin_menu and through it menu items which are not served by CiviCRM.

Issues for other people who experienced the clash between the new CiviCRM menu and Admin Menu were noted by people testing the 3.0 releases in these threads:
* http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,9305.0.html
* http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,9987.0.html

The old behaviour can be recovered by applying display: none to the new CiviCRM menu. (Is there a switch in CiviCRM to turn the new menu off entirely?)

My suggested solution would be that if we detect the presence of the admin_menu, we make a few changes. For example:

If admin_menu is present, I think we should follow admin_menu's behaviour with regard to expanding the menus on hover, not click.

If admin_menu is present, I think we should allow users to present the full CiviCRM menu tree within admin_menu's hierarchy.

If the current user is not able to view admin_menu and does have access to CiviCRM, then we should allow presentation of the CiviCRM menu.

I have read Kurund's comment suggesting that the CiviCRM menu should be visible only on CiviCRM pages, but I feel doubtful that most users would comprehend the modal behaviour of the CiviCRM UI based on the current page location. This could be optional, but I think modal UIs can be really confusing for some people.

I also recognise that some of the suggestions I'm making might require changes in admin_menu - please don't let that stop you considering the concepts on their merit. I'm hoping just to float some suggestions for improved UI here and would really appreciate feedback. CiviCRM menu brings some great features to the table (ie the integrated contact search box - YUM); I don't want to throw that away - just to integrate as best as possible with other great features we're already enjoying.

Comments / thoughts please?

Chris - I've added a "candidate" item on the 3.2 roadmap to revisit this after more folks have had time to experience the 3.0 menu and get feedback from users in various settings. I think it may make sense to add some mechanism to configure the behaviors since some settings / users are mostly Civi-focused in their usage, while others move back and forth frequently between Civi and other CMS functions in their day-to-day work.

I would like to see both. What I did for one site is set the CiviCRM menu to be down 20 pixels or so from the top of the screen, thus both are visible. The second item in the admin_menu dropdowns is still hidden by the CiviCRM menu, but anyway both are basically usable. This setup works for me.

Of course if you scroll the page down and then back up, the CiviCRM menu goes up to zero, not 20 px down, but this basic approach I think could work. Then each user has both menus.

My 2 cents.

I would agree with all three points raised above and in my opinion, they all detract from the usefulness of the new menu. Points 2 and 3 are relevant to any site, even without admin_menu.