CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hello forum!
Well I'm just getting started with CiviCRM, working for a refugee organisation and I think I'm in over my head! What I need to do is to put a directory of locally available services, that is easy to navigate by people with english as a second language. 
Therefore, I want to hide areas such as Instant Messaging and email preferences as they are not relevant. Is this possible? It would also be good to be able to hide areas such as State and Country from the contact listings (as I am only dealing with organisations in the North East of England!).
Also is it possible to have custom fields apply only to particular groups? So far I can only get it to apply to all organisations and I have different requirements of community groups than I do for service providers.
If anyone can help I would really appreciate it.
Many thanks.

Do what peterd says, and you can also set up your localization here at Administer CiviCRM > Global Settings > Localization

Then you can use profiles like Peterd mentioned to create your own contact input/edit/view forms. there is lots of documentation about this here: http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC/Profiles+Admin

So basically, you will create a custom profile form with just the basic info, and have your users put contacts in with this form, and edit contacts with that form (instead of the default forms that have too much stuff on them).

The other option is to create custom templates that override the default templates so the fields aren't shown. This is a bit more advanced, but there is info about how to do these such things here: http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC/Customizing+CiviCRM+Screens

I would recommend using profiles though; it's the easiest and should do what you want.