Author Topic: Feature requests: Time/display in hours and minutes, cloning event templates... (Read 1221 times)

lolas · March 10, 2014, 10:50:58 am

First of all thanks for all the work on this excellent extension! In one of the first implementations we received a few feature requests. I was wondering if any of these are something that others are interested in and might be worth submitting as feature requests on Jira:

When using Event Template - the Volunteer options are not cloned
Setup a notification to site admins (role or contact selected) that a new volunteer signed up
Would it be possible to log volunteer time in hours or minutes - as a choice that would convert the numbers?
We would like to be able to bulk schedule volunteer activities from the New Activities screen and assign them to proper events

Notes:

For (2) "Setup a notification to site admins (role or contact selected) that a new volunteer signed up" I had thought that the ideal fix would be for the civicrm_activity table to get a "created" column that would be available as a time offset in the Scheduled Reminders screen. So this one would be a core fix rather than CiviVolunteer specific.

For (3) "Would it be possible to log volunteer time in hours or minutes - as a choice that would convert the numbers?" I was wondering how much support in core might be desirable also. CiviCRM does not have a "duration" type field but it might be useful in CiviHR or other places as well. I did see a Drupal module that provided a duration field: https://drupal.org/project/hms_field. It is also possible a little JQuery might be enough.

Coleman Watts · March 10, 2014, 11:53:51 am

#3 agree that any improvements in this area should go in core. Activity duration is a core field.
This gets into difficulty with localization since different cultures may represent hours and minutes differently (not sure how, maybe the ':' is not always used as a separator?)
This may be part of the solution: http://api.jqueryui.com/spinner + https://github.com/jquery/globalize

lolas · March 10, 2014, 04:31:26 pm

Coleman,

Thanks for the feedback. Would you agree that #1 is an actual bug? It seems that the CiviVolunteer options should either replicate along with the event template or not display at all on the event template setup.

Coleman Watts · March 10, 2014, 05:35:11 pm

Well it's somewhere on the continuum between bug and missing feature. It falls into the category of "something that hasn't been done yet and it would be nice if someone would do it." Not sure who that someone is though.

Michael Z Daryabeygi · March 11, 2014, 07:00:13 am

Hi Lolas,
Thanks for your input. We are in the stage of gathering feature requests and looking for folks to fund the development.

#3 is definitely we have thought about from the beginning, but as already stated, it is a deeper issue.

I see #1 and #4 as related. The link between CiviVolunteer and Events is actually pretty weak, so I assume you are talking about replicating already defined needs for one event into another? I think the difference between #1 and #4 could be defining needs vs scheduling volunteers? If you can help us find other people who want this functionality, maybe we can get some crowd-funding going. I think it is in the cards for the long run as it will be important for scalability. Your two cases highlight the difficulty in pinning down just the right way to do it, or how many different ways there need to be to accomplish the same thing.

For #2, I would think that it would be a quick code customization to setup the alert for you. Do you have someone that knows a little PHP?

Cheers

lolas · March 11, 2014, 07:41:32 am

Hello Gingkomzd,

Yes, #1 and #4 are related. They are both ways that this user is looking to speed up the data entry when creating a lot of events. I think that #1 is more important so I opened a feature request for it. I don't want to seem greedy so I didn't open a request for any of these others.

Agreed that #2 is an easy customization using the civicrm_pre or post hook but we were hoping to see it in the extension for everyone's use out of the box. I think there is even a workaround with scheduled reminders - set up a reminder to the admin 100/200 days before the volunteer activity etc (assuming we are only scheduling events say 30 days out) then it should get sent immediately.

Still, I was quite interested in the idea of immediate reminders for activities going into core. It seems like it would be very useful for CiviCRM users to be able to get reminders as soon as a new activity is scheduled for them. The possible drawback is the concept of storing the activity creation date in the table. Although nice for record keeping purposes this table can get quite large already for installs that use a lot of activities. It is possible the activity creation date could be made available as a time offset in the scheduled reminders setup without storing it in the table. It would be sort of a virtual field that is actually triggering on the pre or post hook.

We are implementers and I will be at the code sprint in April. I am not sure what is planned for the sprint. I would be happy to work on any of these issues that might be within my capabilities if time permits.

Upperholme · September 28, 2014, 07:24:28 am

Just picking up on the idea of having CiviVolunteer support event templates.

I've just started work on a new project where the client has multiple recurring events with volunteer requirements, and so the ability to define volunteer needs within an event template would be really useful, and make CiviVolunteer a viable solution.

Wondering what the current status is on this issue/feature request? It'd possible we may be able to define a modest budget to help support the development of this feature, if funding is holding things back.

lolas · September 28, 2014, 07:45:03 am

There was an issue created for it here: https://issues.civicrm.org/jira/browse/VOL-37.

If you can contact the CiviVolunteer team with some funding you may be able to influence whether it gets on the road map:
https://civicrm.org/blogs/ginkgomzd/cast-your-vote-now-civivolunteer-functionality-45-upgrade-testers-needed
http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC/CiviVolunteer+Extension+Roadmap

GinkgoFJG · September 29, 2014, 10:08:47 am

There has been some conversation in the issue Lola referenced. Would love to see this happen for 1.5 -- we're working this week on pulling some items from the collective wishlist and putting estimates to them. I'm not sure the conversation can move forward meaningfully without this.

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Author Topic: Feature requests: Time/display in hours and minutes, cloning event templates... (Read 1221 times)

lolas

Feature requests: Time/display in hours and minutes, cloning event templates...

Coleman Watts

Re: Feature requests: Time/display in hours and minutes, cloning event templates...

lolas

Re: Feature requests: Time/display in hours and minutes, cloning event templates...

Coleman Watts

Re: Feature requests: Time/display in hours and minutes, cloning event templates...

Michael Z Daryabeygi

Re: Feature requests: Time/display in hours and minutes, cloning event templates...

lolas

Re: Feature requests: Time/display in hours and minutes, cloning event templates...

Upperholme

Re: Feature requests: Time/display in hours and minutes, cloning event templates...

lolas

Re: Feature requests: Time/display in hours and minutes, cloning event templates...

GinkgoFJG

Re: Feature requests: Time/display in hours and minutes, cloning event templates...