CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Dan,

Unfortunately, this is not possible without hacking the code and the database at the moment. You might want to file an issue for CiviCRM 2.0 in our issue tracker (http://issues.civicrm.org/), since it's a thing that would be good to have fixed for next version.

Thx,
m

P.S. If you are brave and want to use a dirty hack (definitely not recommended), you can go to <civicrm_home>/CRM/Contact/Form/Individual.php and change line 79 from

$form->addElement('select', 'greeting_type', ts('Greeting'), CRM_Core_SelectValues::greeting());

to

$form->addElement('select', 'greeting_type', ts('Greeting'), CRM_Core_SelectValues::greeting(), 'Informal');

This will work only for the newly created contacts added through new contact form. It won't work for any other place where Individual is created (like quick add block in Drupal for example, or import).

To update greeting_type for existing contacts, you need to perform below on your database:

update civicrm_individual set greeting_type = 'Informal';

It will change the greeting type for all the contacts of type Individual to "Dear [name]".

However, as said - although relatively simple, this is a quick, dirty and inconsistent hack - it can solve part of your problems, but can also create additional ones, so if you can avoid applying it, please do.

Hello once more.

So, the query worked fine.  But hacking individual.php doesn't seem to have had any effect. I am trying to add a contact via "new individual".

Thanks