Posted 04.22.2010 by Jack
Kyle Jaster from Rayogram
- http://civicrm.org/blog/3711
- Rayogram planned and developed features with the intent to contribute them back to the larger Civi community
- When approaching projects like that, you need to think about how you can abstract your requirements so that they fit more use cases than just yours
- Tackled all of the core-related work first, so that bug fixes got into CiviCRM svn and can be easily pulled to facilitate the more customized aspects of dev for the project
NYSS Use Case
- typical contact tracking with a few custom profile fields
- extensive use of CiviCase and Activities
- integration with legacy mass mail solution (for now, CiviMail possible in the future)
- nearly standalone - very few Drupal features used
- big database, lots of records!
Optimization
- did a lot of testing & improvements to make sure it would work for NYSS
- many of these improvements will be part of CiviCRM 3.2 release
- worked with core
- memcache support
- Apache Solr search
Front End
- usability improvements, new features, increased "themeability" of CiviCRM
- usability improvements
- formalized the workflow in the UI - built in ways to go about the work (search, view, edit, repeat) - make that implicit in the UI
- pulled out nav bar to avoid confusion for end users
- consistent styling of forms
- clean up look and feel, reduce visual clutters
- restyled Contact Summary to reduce visual noise
- unbolded field labels so that content is more prominent and easily scanned rather than focus on labels
- when clicking on help links, help pops up consistently in one spot (for them, bottom right corner of the screen)
- looks like they somehow implemented vertical tabs?
- increased quality of page titles - things that you're doing are laid out in the page title for better context
- buttons: added semantic icons to buttons
- themeability and design tweaks
- separate out structural CSS, eases dev work in refining UI, prep future "custom css" directory
- vertical tabs that are shown in demo aren't going to be in CiviCRM core yet, but Kyle will publish the CSS
- New Features
- context-sensitive Actions module
- ability to edit contact info from any screen, not just returning to Summary
- Summary Overlay - as of 3.2, when you hover over a contact in search results, it pulls up basic profile info
- Free-Tagging Contacts, Cases, and Activities
- reserved = not editable by a general user
- CiviCase dashboard elements as dashlets on Contact dashboard