CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Thanks for taking on this project royal121!

Just to set some context for this: Is your review only oriented to providing the community with feedback, or does it also extend to making some changes in documentation and/or code?

Here's feedback on your points:

1. Are all elements of the checklist things that have to be done prior to website use? No. It is designed to be a convenient 'checklist' to review prior to using the site. It is expected that the default settings will often be sufficient. But in general it is a good practice for even experienced installers to go through all of the settings on these pages. As well, it is important to note that depending on what you want to do with the site, there are other configuration settings that need to be reviewed/changed, for example setting up Membership Types for your organization if you intend to use CiviMember.

Could you prepare a statement for the top of the checklist that encapsulates this idea?

2. I like your suggestion of moving the summary of the components to a more appropriate place on the page.

3. To improve the documentation for 'Display Preferences', could you try out the options, check if they do what you think after reviewing existing documentation in the book, then take a stab at writing up explanations for each option. I would suggest help text that would normally be hidden but would appear if someone clicked on the ? icon beside the field label.

4. The checklist items turn from red to green as soon as they have been visited once, not when they have actually been set up properly, which is hard/impossible for the system to determine. The reason is that the appropriate settings depend on what you want the CiviCRM installation to do. Drupal can be used to create a huge variety of CMS sites; similarly, CiviCRM can be used to create a huge variety of CRM sites.

5. I am unsure what you mean by 'the community website'. Is there a list of requirements somewhere? Maybe post a link to the Google Code In - 2013 task.

You should imagine and develop requirements for a site for your school or club. How could a CRM be used to advance their mission? What functionality and configuration options are needed to accomplish that?

It's up to you to drive things on this point, rather than follow a recipe.

@royal121: if you can articulate a simple sample site through a few points here, then kreynen and I can provide suggestions for what needs to be done to implement it, and you can indicate where the documentation needs to be improved / take a stab at improving the documentation.

Since most of the functionality in CiviCRM keys off the contacts, a logical place to start is by either manually adding or importing your contacts.

The "Full Video" links to both creating and importing contacts exist here...

http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRM/Video+Project+Tracking+Page

Creating an Event is also covered, but there isn't a video yet for displaying the Events as Calendar in the CMS.  I created a "beardcast" for the CiviCRM Multiday Event https://vimeo.com/46068105, but that isn't really designed for new users.  There are a few different modules and extensions to handle the calendar display.

https://drupal.org/project/civicrm_multiday_event
https://drupal.org/project/civicrm_events
https://civicrm.org/extensions/event-calendar-extension

One option that's been discussed is to provide a list of common tasks a new user might want to do next and links to the video and documentation to do that.

hey royal and kevin:

thanx for taking the intiiative and pushing this project forward. I liked the details in your report. Very complete.

Would be great if you continue spending a few more hours and help build a tour of civicrm

lobo