CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hello,

This forum post is partly aimed at Kyle since I picked up at the book sprint today that you are doing some work on re-theming the menu which includes looking at the reports menu.  This may be outside of your scope, but if you have time and inclination to implement this, I think it would reduce the menu size and help people understand the difference between instances and templates.

Feedback from clients is that the way that CiviCRM ships out of the box with a load of reports enabled is confusing because it doesn't help understand the difference between templates and instances.  They think all the instances are templates (especially when they can edit the report settings and criteria).

We could reduce the amount of examples to say 4, which would still get people started with the idea of instances, and the fact that not all report templates are actually implemented as instances would be illustrative.  To make it more explicit that these reports are just there to give them the idea, we could call the instances 'example *** report'. e.g.

* Example Event Participant Report (List)
* Example membership report (summary)
* Example membership report (detail)
* Example top donor report

What you guys think?  I could also try and implement this change if you think it would be better.

Michael

Yeah - Kyle and I talked  a bit about that and agree that the monster list of report instances is confusing.  I like the "example" idea - and I think 2 - 4 at most would suffice for out of the box. If we decide that the "examples" are the way to go, we should include those we think we be most useful, such as donation details or summary, and maybe an event report too?  keep it simple.