CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

i dont think a simple recipe for that exists right now. i suspect u will need to hack the code to make this happen

lobo

That doesn't mean a calendar date picker is the solution.  We are receiving complaints from staff and users that the date picker is a confusing interface because the inclination is first to choose your month, then you day, and once you do, the date picker closes, so your birthday is not August 20th, 2010.  Then you click on the date again and change your year. you think you are done, you tab away, but the date did not change because the date picker wants you to reselect the DAY before you continue.

Did anyone actually try this solution out with real users in the field before just rolling with it?  Why not have the 3 drop down fields for MM DD YYYY? Or allow configurable date input format?

I can see where a calendar date picker could be useful: identifying dates in the future for civievents or mailing scheduling, or picking a date that a meeting or call happened retrospectively (for an activity), but for a date that people know by heart: their birthday, or that is provided on a paper membership form or similar that an admin just needs to enter, anything i can think of would be easier than a calendar date picker which will only slow down data entry because it requires the user to switch to the mouse from the keyboard.

I've created a ticket, which i suspect someone will close based on the comments above, but I would encourage all to think about the Usability implications of this decision: http://issues.civicrm.org/jira/browse/CRM-6698

1. please do provide a patch to make date input configurable across CiviCRM. that would be helpful to you and the community

2. Did you / CivicActions actually test the solution when it was in alpha/beta/final (it came out in 3.0, approx ONE YEAR ago) and give feedback and raise questions. I suspect not. Yes, i do agree that the current situation is not perfect and can be improved (hence see item 1 above).

3. I do encourage you / CA / other firms to think about and do provide feedback and "real world" usability testing when we have a new version on the sandbox. We do make a strong attempt to get sandbox up and running when we are semi-stable (i.e. a few weeks before alpha). If things dont feel right, please talk about it and better yet provide developer hours to fix and improve the issue

looking forward to the patch

lobo