CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hi there,

A profile is a list of fields. It would be great if some non-fields could be including - e.g. text, headings, even html freeform. Sometimes there are several 'chunks' to a profile and adding stuff in-between them would be useful (I can kind of use the help from the previous field to add stuff to but usually a heading for a chunk of fields should come before them)

If we could just add a 'help' field without a field it would do it.

Understand your point Lobo - I think in terms of UI for what Eileen is proposing, on the "View and Edit Fields' screen, as well as New CiviCRM Profile Field (not sure why it needs to say CiviCRM in that button), there could be an "Add Help Field" which would then be a simple 'pre-form help' type field - and would be able to be 'ordered' just as the real fields are, so it can be located as a 'section break' or 'instructions for a group of fields'.

Thanks Lobo,

A general note about following the Drupal model. My experience of Drupal is that it is developer friendly but not user friendly (I suspect their website is neither but maybe one day I'll grow a propeller and it will magically seem intuitive). Joomla, by contrast is much more user friendly but probably less developer friendly. On installing joomla or new joomla components my impression was always 'cool - look at all these things I can do now', the comparable experience with Drupal tends to be "huh", followed by a trawl of the web for useful explanations.

If civiCRM goes down the path of focussing on making it easier people to do their own customisation rather than building stuff into civi I think it will also need to think about how to encourage people not just to customize their site but create & share their modules which tweak civi to their needs. In my mind I compare this with virtuemart, also a significant add-in module / component, for which there are a handful of modules around to tweak this or that (some get incorporated over time). To my knowledge there is no central repository for virtuemart tweaks - they are distributed around the web.