CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I'm interested in providing organizational feedback, testing, documentation and other services related to the Mail Blast UI project for GSoC. If you have any questions, feedback on ideas or directions, or discussion around this, post here.

For reference, you can read about the Mail Blast UI project proposal here: http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRM/Google+Summer+of+Code+-+2014

I'm in india right now, and my goal is to convince my nephew and his buddies (who are in a great school for CS in mumbai) to submit a proposal for this. I'll try to recruit two or three students with kurund as their local mentor

My thoughts are:

- rewrite mail blast UI in JS using angular (since angular is google, maybe a good selling point)
- integrate reports and graphs via dataviz (or xavier's latest toy)
- add A/B testing (which needs reports to analyze) to mail blast

lobo

I'd be happy to co-mentor on this. A slick email platform would make a compelling case for a lot of organisations considering Civi.

We've got a slight improvement to interface almost ready to release which might act as as starting point too.

Hi, I'm Siddhant Rajagopalan, an Undergraduate student studying CSE from IIT Bombay. There was a seminar in our institution regarding GSOC which introduced me to the whole idea. I came across CIVICRM and learnt they were based in Mumbai. I had a meeting with the core team members, Donald Lobo and Kurund Jalmi where we discussed the Mail Blasting UI of CIVICRM and spoke about improving the User Interface using modern frameworks like angularjs.

Here is my Project Proposal

The internet has been moving towards browser based applications. This is because of their numerous advantages. They are far more user friendly. As a result Browser based applications are becoming the de facto web standard.

CiviCRM as an open source project needs to start moving in that direction. CiviMail is an important component that has a high impact. Making it a Javascript application using angularjs, enabling it to act as a single page and allowing template and content editors will help vastly improve quality of this feature.  Also CiviMail a relatively simple ui which makes it a good fit.
Angular.js is a leading javascript framework and building on it might be a good example for future CiviCRM development.

Week 1-2: Research weeks :
1. Get up to speed on angular.js
2. Get up to speed on civi mail functionality
3. Learn civicrm REST API.

Week 3: Design and Usability mock ups
1. Create wire frame for new CiviMail ui.
2. Create specifications at a high level.

Week 4-6:
1. Blog post on civicrm.org summarizing findings of research and the specifications.
2. First prototype of the new CiviMail.
3. Set of tests to ensure working of prototype
   
Week 7-9:
1. 2nd iteration based on the feedback from early alpha testers.
2. Deploy on demo instance
3. A blog post with details of the new version and requests of feedback from the community.

Week 10:
1. Integrate with AB testing project
2. Extend work to cover all CiviMail settings.
3. Document work done.
4. Create plan to migrate other CiviCRM components to a similar framework

Week 11:
1. Testing and bug fixes.
2. Merge into CiviCRM master.

Week 12:
1. Project wrap up and buffer week.
2. Final blog post

Any feedback regarding the proposal would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Siddhant Rajagopalan.

Hi Siddhant,

Thanks for taking this on. I echo Xavier's thoughts on checking out other tools. You can sign up for a free account for Mailchimp and Campaign Monitor, both are well designed platforms from a UI perspective. In the application I would play up the impact the emails sent from Civi have for the charitable organisations. Also that smaller orgs might not have technically able staff so an easy to use robust tool is vital for them. We've got a slightly tweaked form that we're almost ready to share which can go with Eileen's CSS code that might be a good base from which to start.

I manage a relatively large CiviCRM installation which multiple users have access to CiviMail, the issues they run into are

- Ease of use
- Multi step form
- Breaking email templates

If there's time I would add the following into you plan

- Add new responsive HTML email templates to CiviMail, something like Ink from Zurb http://zurb.com/ink/templates.php

Just an updated link on the cssinline stuff

http://fuzion.co.nz/blogs/styling-mails-civimails-civicrm

We have been getting requests for people to be able to use CiviMail without 'seeing CiviCRM', 'to post content items to their CMS & have them go out as CiviMails' & to be able to enter people into the mailings as they go. I only mention these as a flavour of comments we have been getting. It looks like you have an ample number of Organization contacts on this but I could probably find more if you wanted.

I'm not sure I would include this in your project scope "Integrate with AB testing project" - It seems to me like a diversion & one that could blow out time-wise & have dependencies on other people's work.

Also, depending how you write your code, writing the tests could take longer than you are expecting. If you write your tests as you write your code you may not find that the case. I would suggest you include looking into tests in your research & development.

Overall, this seems to me like an exciting project & I think your proposal so far is well thought out & structured.

+1 on managing realistic scope/expectations. I think that producing a single-page rich UI without adding major features is a pretty big advancement and pretty ambitious -- it's most likely that a student working on this will be working on multiple fronts (ie learning a JS framework, learning Civi's framework, thinking about using them together, handling the existing features, and working in a big codebase/community for the first time).

If we can succeed with this project, then that moves the ball forward a *lot*, and it'll be easier for us (as a community) to figure out follow-up projects that add more features on top.