CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I'm curious if anyone has thought about how to make it easier to pick from a large group of lists.

For example, we have some CiviCRM installations that have hundreds of groups. All the groups are active (so regular pruning is not really an option). When you need to pick one or more groups (for example in advanced search or when sending an email) it can be daunting to scroll through the huge list.

Any ideas? I was imagining some kind of javascript pop up that would allow you to filter the list in a similar way that you can filter the list in the Manage Group section.

Also wondering about adding a tagging functionality or some other way to filter groups besides the ones already provided in the Manage Group section.

Thanks!

jamie

How about some discussion about having an 'option' field for Groups so that we can effectively 'tag' them as to what 'sort' of group they are?

i shouldn't have used the word 'tag' - i should have just said 'classify'

Probably not in the use cases I have looked over. I think the ultimate would be a checkbox field that admins can add additional options to, that would then be available for 'filtering' on the Groups page.

This probably sits alongside the discussion from way back about being able to flag that a Group is a Test Mailing Group

We also need to classify groups as petednz is suggesting. We do this in Manage Groups by adding additional 'types' in addition to Access Control and Mailing List. As jamie said, extending this filter to the Advanced Search Screen would be very helpful for organisations with hundreds of groups. To my mind, a filter like this has a very different function to the parenting hierarchy. 

A use case might help.  In our church we have groups that are mailing lists, administrative groupings etc but we also have over 100 'real' groups - small groups of people who meet together mid-week in a particular locality/age group. These groups signify a particular level of engagement and we're interested in tracking their growth, leadership etc

In Manage Groups I have added a 'Real Groups' type but this only enables me to filter lists in Manage groups. I'd like in future to use this filter to determine views, reports etc. It would also be very helpful to easily identify people who are not in a certain type of group eg people not in a mid-week group, as we can then target communication to those individuals. At present the 'not in a group' custom search requires you to select individual groups which isn't practical when you want to know who is not in several hundred groups (which are all the same type)!

On a different note, we've recently developed a way of showing the growth/decline of a group over time and I'd like to see Groups functionality extended hugely in time... but that's another conversation!