CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

hi,
unfortunately, unless you want to get into customizing the code, your only option is establishing a logical naming convention. Or, you could fund this as a project for the core developer team: http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,16967.msg72233.html#msg72233 and http://civicrm.org/mih

cynthia

Dave
We've been using Civi for 4 months and this is exactly the same issue our organisation is facing.  We're also checking out the Andrew Harris info that lobo mentioned with interest.  We are currently doing various things - some interim, some not, some simple, some more sophisticated:

- We haven't used tagging for groups but we have used parenting hierarchies extensively (though you're right that this doesn't 'show' in the Manage Groups area).  I need group names to remain intuitive so have used a naming convention/code in the Description box.  All this does at present is give a quick reference point about the hierarchy.  It would be more use if the Description column could be ordered (like every other column on that page).  I've posted on the forum to see if that might be possible.   

- We're looking into http://emphanos.com/blog/ re Civi option lists as you can add a 'group type' (in addition to Access Control and Mailing List) and search by type eg Committee 1 to just show those groups.

- We've also created a view (see attachment) that enables us to see groups within their parented hierarchies.  This view also shows the number of people in each group/subgroup and clicking on a group name allows all group members to be seen in the right hand column (I haven't shown this as it includes real names!) It's currently proving a challenge to get the hierarchies to show in csv but we're persevering. 

We also plan to develop reporting capabilities on hierarchied groups in the coming months to detail growth and decline over time.  I blogged about this (a bit long-windedly) at http://civicrm.org/blogs/davem/marketing-civicrm as we'd love the sort of reporting available in Civimember to apply to groups too. 

We're committed to the use of groups as we sync our Civi groups with Drupal Organic Groups to enable lots of (imminent) functionality for logged in group members on our website www.woodlandschurch.net 

I'm not a developer so can't tell you more about the groups view technically but let me know if it's of interest and I'll try to get technical info from our developer for you. 

Lindsey

Hi Pete
It's too complex for that so we'll set up a sandbox project on drupal.org  Will take a few days to get round to that but I will try to remember to post when we do!
Lindsey

Thanks for the followup replies here. The approach we are looking at now is adopting a naming convention and tweaking the way the groups are created in Civi. I don't have full developer insight into how this works either, but basically we have:

1) groups that are created in Civi automatically when organic groups are created in Drupal and users are granted a role of participant in the group. These are intended to be "read-only" groups--users are not allowed to manage them in Civi.
2) regular groups that users may create on their own from Civi
3) smart groups created in Civi

Right now, the groups from #1 end up in Civi with names like "January 2011" In Drupal, "January 2011" is a child group of "Board Meetings". So, if we can simply cause the name in Civi to be "Board Meetings - January 2011 (Participants)" this would solve the issue from my perspective. For #2 and #3, we can tell people to follow the naming conventions. That is all we really need and all we can afford given we have about 10 hours of development time to spend on this part of our project.

The OG nodes are named by staff and are used to create committees and projects in a collaborative site. Visually, it will look terrible if the "flattened" information is displayed in this manner on the website. So for example you would see, on a committee page, the title of "XYZ Committee" and then a list of the projects (child groups). If it is possible to have an internal OG name that is used in Civi and a separate display name, then yes, that would solve the problem. A similar issue arises for permalinks when people go in and change the name of the group, etc.

- We've also created a view (see attachment) that enables us to see groups within their parented hierarchies.  This view also shows the number of people in each group/subgroup and clicking on a group name allows all group members to be seen in the right hand column (I haven't shown this as it includes real names!) It's currently proving a challenge to get the hierarchies to show in csv but we're persevering. 

Hi Lindsey

How did you create that view? I'm very keen to have that functionality.

cheers
Ryan

Hi Lindsey

Thanks so much for that - I will install on our new instance of 4.1.5 and have a play.

cheers!
Ryan