CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Probably the single most request from my customers is to tweak the core screens / forms.

Like: Can we get rid of the data of birth field on the contact screen? Can I have the address block way up top when creating a new contact? Can I have the job title listed on the relationships tab? Can I add the phone number on the left-side quick create? Etc, etc.

So, can there be an easy way to tweak these core screens/forms/lists/etc? At minimum an XML description of the screen that we can override, ideally a graphical form builder that would allow us to rearrange the screen/form graphically with drag/drop, or anything else.

See around 1:00 - 2:30 of the following: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gb791SrJBJY. It would be waaaay coool to rearrange the CiviCRM screens like that!

I do not know if there is anything like that in Symfony or if we'll have to find it some place else (building it might be a bit too ambitious).

I agree this would be very very useful. 

As a user who has just upgraded from 4.2 to 4.4 I now find the block in the prime location on my contact summary screen (top left) contains only one field (nickname) that we use regularly. The rest are used for only 5% of our contacts. 

I would love to be able to drag and drop the blocks to suit our use.

Something like that would be terrific and a huge plus in making Civi better for end users! I would try to get funds for a MIH for that. 

You know the best way to do all of this would be to rewrite all of the display logic so that it makes use of the API exclusively.
This gives you a twofold win:

• Ability to customise the screens via standard hooks
• Scalability of the api

It will definitely show up many limitations in the current API but this is exactly the purpose of this exercise; the API should enable a developer to reimplement all the core display functionality.

Indeed, but this is the Saloon, so I was putting the idea out there!

Its more about thinking about the direction of the display logic and creating a proper MVC style separation.

For instance there are a lot of inconsistencies in the implementation of the Label generation code vs Export in terms of how they scale and how they handle things like merging by address / household. If these were implemented in terms of the api then you start to get an efficient api exposed to the users (which the current api really isn't in some areas).

Basically my thinking here is that civicrm needs to start to eat its own medicine in terms of using the api itself; afterall if you currently want to change a core screen you're either going to have to hack core (or at least some rather convoluted hooks) or implement your own display screen in terms of the API. I've gone down exactly that route of implementing my own display screen over the API for two reasons; the permissions system in Civicrm is very convoluted to tightly restrict users to a very small subset of the data and smarty templates just don't quite integrate into the theme that the rest of my site is using without extra css to style the smarty generated parts of the html.

A gist I wrote a year ago on Contribute forms, was a draft of a blog post that didn't eventuate then.