CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Many activities have nothing to do with engagement level. The current implementation of engagement_level field on _ALL_ activities of all type is inappropriate. Many organizations do not use engagement levels, though certain models of community organizing do. For those that implement engagement levels, many of them place it as a calculated value on the contact to assist in segmenting the contact. I don't think this field should be in core product by default. I think it would be fine to add it as a field in a CiviEngage extension.

Comments? Feedback?

Hi Joe,

Good point, in general, we should (and do) move more to a "lighter" core and more extensions.

IMO if it makes the interface more complex and is not needed by "a majority" (highly subjective, I'd argue that the majority of civi users should be concerned about engagements it should be part of an extension, unless technical (and or marketing/political) reasons.

I'd argue as well that civiaccount would make sense as an extension too as (the majority?) of users don't need "accountant correct" export and would prefer not to loose he performance due to the more complex financial structure it introduces

As for the engagement, I think it's a good example. In the core it's "simply" a new column in the activity table and some UI and reporting.

If it were an extension, it'd need a separate table or a custom field, both more expensive (ie extra join, more records) and probably loosing some functionalities (eg in export/api/report/search) were the extra field is "trivial" to add but the extra field in a joined table might imply way more wrestling with the framework.

And I don't think anyone has the resources to "redo as extension" what is already in the core, especially if whomever added that in the core thought (often for good reasons) that this need was a common one shared by the majority so I think we should have that discussion about new features, but for existing ones, it's likely to reach the point of status quo being cheaper, and therefore better

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@coleman you are right.

However, some might want to have surveys or petition but not engagement index?

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