CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I like the generic way CiviCRM is handling activities. It can be customized in a lot of way by creating new activities, adding custom fields on it, grouping them by using CiviCase.

Now, from a user perspective, activity encompass a lot of different concepts and it can be difficult for a new user to understand what an activity is and find what he wants.

Just thinking out loud here but i think it could be more intuitive to categorized activities and display them differently (separate tab ?) depending on their category.

What I can thought of :
* all activities that are related to scheduling should be displayed in a calendar (already possible with https://civicrm.org/extensions/contact-calendar) or todo list : meeting, follow-up planned in the future. We could have specific display for today activities or late activities.
* all communications activities (phone, email, ...) could be for example displayed threaded as in a mailbox with an easy way to create a reply
* online recording activities should be in a specific log tab : these activities are just generated for logging purpose because there is a membership, contribution, participation, ... record created that contains the information needed for everyday tasks.
* other ?

I just want to see if it's seems like a good idea that could needs more detailed specs and if any thinking has already been done on the subject.

I gave a lot of thought to these suggestions - but the more I tried to put my thoughts together, the more it just sounded like I wanted Drupal Views for activities.  In fact, Views could do a few of the things being requested here.

I think an easy way to implement at least part of this functionality in Civi would be to add a feature that loaded a report into a tab, taking the contact ID as a parameter.  Anything you could do on a report (e.g. filter to certain activities) would be available as a tab.  You'd also get permissioning for (almost) free, and custom reports would be a way to easily handle the more obscure activity reporting folks have.

By combining with CiviReport, any improvements to CiviReport would be gained in the new tabs and vice versa.  Also, this could have potential applications beyond just custom activity views.

Samuel,

I agree!  I didn't mean to suggest that "CiviReport in a tab" was the solution to all your use cases - rather, it would cut down the amount of work needed to implement what you need, give us the flexibility to fit new use cases, and the work that IS done (e.g. adding a calendar view) could then be reused by the reporting modules.

I think a possible solution to making the interface intuitive is to make some pre-built reports either in core as an extension.