CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hi all.

Please excuse me if this is posted before, but I couldn't seem to find it.

Is there a way of editing what information is shown in the default profile when you look at a contact?  There's currently lots of extraneous information on each contacts page, such as 'employed by' and 'communication preferences'.  In fact, I don't need some of those blocks at all.

I'd imagine it's something to do with creating a profile with exactly the information I'd like on it, then changing a setting to display that profile rather than the default. Is this correct? What exactly would I change?

Thanks.
Sean.

Hi Sean,

First - are you actually using CiviCRM 3.2.1 like your profile says?  If so, some of what I'm going to suggest isn't going to work.

There are lots of ways to do what you're describing.  The quickest way is to go to Administer menu > Customize Data and Screens > Display Preferences.  From there you can kill a bunch of fields, the "Communications Preferences" block, and so forth.

The next easiest way doesn't exist yet!  A major goal of CiviCRM 5.0 is to allow this sort of fine-grained control over forms - but that's not here yet.

Finally - the Summary tab's display isn't controlled by a profile - there's a hard-coded template in CiviCRM that controls what displays.  You can either a) override the template (http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC/Theming+CiviCRM) , b) create an ".extra.tpl" file with some jQuery to hide/move existing fields (https://civicrm.org/blogs/dave-greenberg/now-its-easier-add-custom-behaviors-templates), or c) write an extension to inject that JavaScript.  All three of these approaches are fairly technical.  From a to c, they get more difficult but also require less work to recreate changes on upgrade.
 Summary tab, and all the other tabs on a contact record, aren't controlled by profiles.  They're hard-coded templates.  You can certainly change them, and it's something a beginner-level coder could do, but it's not something available to

Ha, sorry JonGold. That's very out of date. I've updated my profile now. I'm using 4.5.7 on Wordpress 4.1.1.

And thanks for the full answer. I knew it could be done by editing the code, which I won't do just now.  I'll wait till (hopefully) 5.0 comes out and it's even better than the current excellent CiviCRM.

Sean.