CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I have been talking with various service providers and developers in the CiviCRM community over the past few weeks giving suggestions on how they can solve some common challenges for getting CiviCRM to work for various use cases (legislative case management, application workflow management, etc). I am finding that a lot of what people are looking for can be accomplished with a pretty lightweight, but flexible, workflow system within Civi.

The common requests or needs from the various individuals I have spoken with are:

1) The ability to assign various objects to an individual for review or modification (which can be done through activities on contacts)

2) A notification system that emails a person when something has been assigned to them

3) Timeline or log of changes made to an object

4) Revision control on changes

5) The ability to set up custom categorizations of activities or workflow tasks to easily organize and filter them

6) The ability to set up custom actions within the system that are triggered by someone changing an item in the workflow

7) The ability to associate various items within the system with an activity or workflow task (a case, a donation, an email, etc)

Productivity reports on workflows

All of this seems very achievable within CiviCRM and we have a great example of this in CiviCase. The workflow will most likely be activity driven, and reporting comes packaged out of the box. There are some other elements here which may or may not be necessary for a workflow system, but nothing seems to complex.

I guess the starting point whether there is a large enough demand for it in the community. What do you all think? Do you have a need for something like this? What are you thoughts on how this could work?

Some of the below can be solved via hooks. I also think integration with the actions / trigger module in drupal will help with notification and other action issues

revision control for core contacts etc has been an issue for some time. However no one has stepped forward to sponsor it (as yet)

as with most open source projects, we do encourage the various service providers / developers to collaborate with each other and help develop solutions to some of their problems and issues. Helps the community as a whole significantly

lobo

Lobo, I am still unclear how people can really go about contributing to the project. Should we just go for it and start coding, or what is the process. I would love to spearhead this and gather some resources of people interested. I just dont want to do get people going on something that might not see the light of day.

there are quite a few different ways for folks to contribute. Depending on whats involved and the scope of stuff. Assuming folks have some time, i woud say: post a specification on what you plan to do and how, invite feedback/comments and then start coding. We'll probably interact with the process at some stage based on what we know etc and potentially advise on the best way to go forward etc

For integration modules with other drupal modules (CCK, triggers), just go for it and do a proof of concept Thats how the views integration module got started

For smaller bugs / minor features, file an issue and attach a patch. Contact us on IRC for help

ultimately getting working code out there counts and makes things happen

lobo

hey matt:

would be great if you could take the lead and help gather a group of folks who are interested in the above features and could help with the spec and potentially get the group to  contribute either coding resources and/or sponsorship dollars to get some of these features

lobo