CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hi!

After attending a little meetup and meeting lobo and kurund here in NYC, we promised some thoughts on our first real experience with implementing CiviCRM for a client).  These thoughts are a bit outdated, sitting in my inbox for a bit, but I thought I'd throw them here.  I posited some thoughts and my associate Ben commented in parentheses.  See below.

My overall take is that it's very powerful and really a fine piece of software.  The interface can certainly be improved, things can be simplified and certain tasks can be made much easier.  Usability is a strength of ours and so we hope to contribute resources as we grow this company and are able to.

I also don't agree with the decision to separate it from a CMS.  If built on Drupal core (create an install profile that only has the bare bones), it could have really leveraged its strong conceptual content creation and administrative model.

Thank you for a great product!

We hope to increase our participation and contributions in this community.

Best,

--D

Digital202
646-536-7502 ||  Office

--

# CiviCRM and Drupal user integration: Manual memberships added, if that person then registers on website we want to know he's a member, best practices. (This works automatically if they use the same email address and/or first and last name. Problem is when they don't; I think we need to know how to combine records as well.)
# Layout, presentation

   1. CiviContribute, CiviMembers -- maybe generic titles like "Memberships", "Contributions" (Dave, I actually like the existing names. Something too generic makes it harder to point people to the right links when doing phone support or writing instructions.)
   2. Menus clumsy (I think they are okay -BH)
   3. Less is more, better ability to hide/expose things (Maybe a tighter organization of the pieces of the page could solve this problem. I don't like looking for hidden functions. Though the AJAXy hiding of parts of the page does work well.)
   4. Lists -- configurability of lists... use the Drupal Views paradigm! (As Lobo said, they want to be independent of any particular CMS.)
   5. Themes? (Themes seem to work fine. The only problem is our theme on IJII sets the font so small...)

# Internationalization -- must hack slightly to support this (Yes, specifically, that State was a required field, and it had no capability to deal with provinces or whatever other countries may use.)
# Community, roadmap, vision (I think they do a good job of this on their site; but I haven't investigated closely.)
# We had problems with search but I have learned search was operating as designed. Use Advanced Search page to find records by email address, etc. CiviCRM is changing some of their help text to make this clear.
# I find confusing knowing exactly what is in CiviCRM Home, versus CiviMember, vs the other components. This could just be my relative unfamiliarity with the system, or perhaps the CiviCRM Home could be better organized, with a separate header for General, CiviMember, CiviContribute, and each component that is installed.