CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I think better use could be made of the ‘above the fold area’ of a contact’s summary page as seen by a back-end user of CiviCRM.
 
To me it makes sense to have the email, phone and address details displayed but I think the Communications Preferences and Demographics panes take up valuable real estate that could be used to display more important information. (eg the info on the membership and relationship tabs) 
 
Each organisation would see different things as “more important” so I think the aim should be to allow customisation of what is displayed so that the most important items for each particular installation are visible without having to change to other  tabs or scroll down the screen.  This would mean that on the phone all relevant information could be seen ‘at a glance’ when dealing with contacts.

The first improvement  I would like to suggest is a that addresses should be displayed in red when Do not mail has been chosen as a communication preference  as happens now with Do not email and email addresses and Do not phone and phone numbers.  I think this would mean that most people would no longer need to have the Communications Preferences pane openly displayed as the important information from that pane would be conveyed through the red text.


Then on the Settings – Display Preference page, under Viewing Contact there could be two options: the existing ‘display as tabs’ option and another  ‘display inline’ option. 

The Communications Preferences and Demographics panes could be added to both option lists so that people could choose to have them displayed as happens now if that information is most important to them.

The options set as ‘display inline’ would come above any inline displays for custom data screen (although to be truly flexible the display order for all these should be configurable).

The "display addresses with do not mail indicator" idea is being implemented for 4.3 at our Bristol Code Sprint right now:
http://issues.civicrm.org/jira/browse/CRM-10880

Full customization control over the Contact Summary would be very cool. If you're interested in working on this ping us on IRC and we can discuss approaches etc.