CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I've just upgraded CiviCRM to 3.4.5 in order to gain access to CiviCampaign.  I'm learning how to use the program but have come across difficulty working with the program.  I'm hoping this community forum might help me trouble shoot how to use the CiviCampaign petition function and help me get off and running.

For starters, I want to create a petition that allows members of my organization and the general public to sign a petition that reminds Antonin Scalia that Catholics believe the death penalty is immoral.

As per the Floss manual directions, I'm having a problem setting up the custom profile. 

Create a custom profile with custom fields to capture responses to the petition
questions. When creating the custom field set, from the Used For dropdown
menu select Activities, and for the activity type select Petition. pg.258

When I go to create the custom data set, used for -> activities -> petition, petition is not one of the choices.  Is this something that I have to enable?  If so, how do I do that?

I just checked my global settings and civicampaign was enabled.  Other suggestions?

I just ran into this exact same problem. I did verify it is listed as enabled under the activity types. Any thing else I can try?

I also tried setting it up as a "campaign" type just to see what would happen. I get this error when I go to the petition URL: 


Notice: Undefined property: CRM_Campaign_Form_Petition_Signature::$_componentCampaigns in CRM_Core_BAO_UFGroup::buildProfile() (line 1916 of /home/miclcom/public_html/sites/all/modules/civicrm/CRM/Core/BAO/UFGroup.php).

OK. Here is what is going on. I think everything was fine the whole time. It was user error. The issue I was having was due to problematic language in the documentation. On the page book.civicrm.org/user/current/petition/setup/  , the section "Create two Custom Profiles" would be a lot easier to understand if how to create custom field sets is listed as a separate step (or even just say create a custom field set and then have a link for more info on how). The problem for me was that I was trying to do this through creating a new profile.

As soon as you posted the link to custom field sets I realized what was going on.

Thank you for your prompt response and help!

All the Best,

Erik

Hi,

Have you tried it on 4.3? The new UI is a great improvement.

<quote>
We can make Civi easy to use- if we put users experiences first.
This seems to be overly complex- when all people are trying to do is work with simple data
</quote>

It's not only about user experience being put first, it's also that making complex stuff works in a simple way is really complex, and takes a lot time conceiving and developing. It would be great to have more resources on usability indeed. Do you have coding skills or budget you could allocate to that task?

It is more than "simple data", we are addressing to related but separate problems: how to display and how to store. They might be different and unfortunately if you want performance and data integrity, it's hardly possible to simply focus on the display and ignore the data model.

X+

I'm working on writing new documentation for 4.3 and the survey system.

Make sure you coordinate with the documentation team on the style / format / focus / tools used of the new documentation that you are working on.

I think michael has already reached out to you in some other forum posts

lobo