CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Here are some of the major issues of concern to us right now, that I think also impact other users, and might be suitable size/scope to take on for a sprint:

1. We'd really like to have customizable welcome/confirmation messages per mailing list group. This is something we really miss in the transition away from Mailman.

2. A payment processor for TrustCommerce. They are a free software friendly service and I have seen this requested by other users in the forum. We currently have some Python code that talks to their API, which I could bring along for reference.

3. Investigation of some bugs in merging, especially loss of the merge results cache when other activity occurs in the database, and strange choices in Group membership settings when two accounts are merged with different statuses for the same Group. Also maybe further optimization of merge queries to scale better on large databases.

4. Fixing bugs with strange info message displays. For example, things like: "The contacts have been merged. The contacts have been merged. The contacts have been merged." after a single merge. Seen similar when editing settings for groups or profiles.

5. This is probably a bigger task, but multiple payment processors being available for single donation/membership forms. In other words, a drop-down where a person could choose either PayPal or another credit card processor.

Some of these things have issues filed already, which I can link up later on, but this is what's on the top of my mind .

-john

It could also be good to work on donor thank-you letter workflow. I didn't realize there wasn't a straightforward way to include contribution amounts in message templates. This would be very useful.

(see http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php?topic=21251.0).

Here are some recent issues we're run into while working with Democracy Now!, Youth Build and the Richard Hugo House.  I'd enjoy co-working on one or more of these if anyone else is interested...

Random

• Better import framework.  No sure what this would look like, but I've built a couple recently tailored for specific use cases.  I think a more general mechanism would be good.
• While working on CiviCRM/Mailchimp integration <http://drupal.org/sandbox/fen/1233314> for, we're run into the issue that it's difficult to fnd all the smart groups a contact is in.  The GroupContact API returns all the (regular) CiviCRM groups a contact is a member of but doesn't return Smart Groups. Essentially you have to build each smart group - using the where_clause in civcirm_saved_search and tacking on AND contact_id = <whatever> - and check if a user is inside it. So a rather heavyweight search loop across all the smart groups is needed to find that in order to be able to update Mailchimp when any details for a contact changes.  There was a MIH for Smart Group Optimization <http://civicrm.org/index.php?q=civicrm/contribute/transact&reset=1&id=3> that would help.
• Drush email sanitize - Use {PREFIX}{HASH}@{DOMAIN} to sanitize CiviCRM email addresses in civicrm_contact and civicrm_uf_match tables (other places?) so that they can match similarly sanitized Drupal emails.

Core/Contacts/Search

• CiviCRM website field url: core contacts have a url field. when editing a contact you can add multiple urls.  however when including this url field on a profile you can only add it once. It would be convenient if url had a descriptor field like IM, phone, email all have that lets you say what kind of url it is. Then you would be able to use URL for facebook, twitter, linked in and other social media profile sites.
• Birthdate tracking granularity settings: birthdate field requires mm/dd/yyyy. some orgs do not care about yyyy, only want to know month and day for birthdays, or maybe even only month. other orgs don’t care about mm/dd because they just want a very general idea of age, perhaps legacy data indicates only an age, or they collect “age” on an intake form or questionnaire rather than DOB. Some people are reluctant to share their full DOB.  IT should be possible to store any amount of birth date from year or month only, to the full DOB.  The Birthday field should use a drop down date picker rather than a calendar popup for ux reasons.
• Calendar widget theming issue on many sites: The calendar widget seems to break in a number of themes, or perhaps there is a conflict with admin module or admin menu. It is unclear. See also this forum topic on the calendar popup.
• Anonymous donor flagging so that you can easily limit results to only those that are not anonymous: Some organizations have donors who wish to remain anonymous (not to the org, but to the public). Under privacy preferences, there should be an additional option for “Keep Donor Anonymous” and this field should be a searchable field.
• Search by date ranges relative to membership year: this would be particularly helpful for contributions, but could also be helpful for activities or events. It would allow for searches relative to a membership start date.  EG: in aggregate, who has made more than $500 in donations since their membership year started (or just membership)? For events it could be useful to see if people attend more events after becoming a member than they did before, or other activities too.

CiviContribute

• Backoffice/offline contribution Receipt “from” addresses: the only option for receipt from addresses when processing or recording a back office contribution is the currently logged in user or the site/domain email address.  The “from” addresses set in the ccrm settings should also be available, or the user recording the contribution should be able to add another address.
• Offline contribution processing: receipt checkbox default (unchecked, could it be checked?): It would probably be a little bit better if the “send receipt” check box could be configured to always be set to send a receipt when offline transactions are processed or recorded.

CiviMember

• Cannot Modify  Membership inheritance rules after membership is setup: it would seem plausible that an organization may decide to change the rules around membership inheritance at some point after initially creating a membership type, to either add a new relationship that can inherit a membership from a primary member, or to remove one.

CiviEvent

• Allow configuration of a deductible amount for each event.  Donation premiums already have this setting, and it is standard practice at fundraising events for only a portion of the ticket price to be deductible.  This option should be added to civievents.
• Additional donation/contribution amount on event registration page some organizations want to solicit an additional donation when a user registers for an event, for example, to collect an additional $10 for a scholarship fund for the event.  Price sets are not a reasonable option in every case for multiple reasons: if you have many events, each would need a price set just to allow someone to add a donation, and price sets cannot be recorded as a different type of contribution.  Ideally, you would be able to set up the additional contribution as a different type of contribution for accounting purposes.

CiviReport

• Event participant report template could be more useful, fix group by and name sorting issue (may be fixed in 3.4.7)
• Book Keeping transaction report needs to have accounting code column, and perhaps others (source, contribution page, …) – modify template
• Report of donors by household and aggregate giving over a period of time: for prospecting purposes it would be helpful to be able to search for donors who have given over a certain amount when combined with their relation’s donations, or households.
• Income Summary Report Template (for civievents)– the report doesn't work. total participant count and total revenue are not displayed.

Passed this to Gregory who submitted that issue (and the majority of the issues listed in my post above).

I would expect relationship type would be a pretty easy filter to add if it's not there.