Candidate Features for v2.0

These features are under consideration for CiviCRM 2.0 release:

CiviContribute Phase 3

• Create a Campaign/Project class and allow users to link Contribs/Contrib Pages to them
• Tell a Friend
• Support work-flows for Thank-you Letter and/or Receipt generation:
  • For email output - add batch tasks: - Send (email) Thank-yous AND Send (email) Receipts. Both tasks would be driven from selected result-set. Would need ability to search on contributions with NULL receipt and/or thank-you dates. Task would allow user to customize our existing thank-you and receipt templates for the send. On success, Thank-you or Receipt Date is updated for selected records.
  • For snail mail or external generations: With the above search additions, we could export items needing Receipt / Thank-you. Perhaps a 'special' export task in the Contributions search page would also update Thank-you or Receipt-date for exported contributions.

Search

• Allow a user entered sql query to be used as the search criteria
• Allow "regular" google-style search across database using Lucene (Zend_Search_Lucene)
• Allow searching of dates relative to the current date (today)

  For example it would be nice to define a smartgroup that says
  Include people where Monthly_Donor = yes
  and where Last_Payment_date is over a month ago
  the "over a month ago" function would understand what the date is
  today and spit us out a current list every time. Note that this isn't
  the same as what we have right now where all dates are absolute but
  requires the development of searching relative to todays date.

Custom Data

• A nice to have little feature Iis to make the number of visible lines in a custom multi-select box configurable similar to how Textarea field display rows & cols are configurable.

Install Improvements (from Owen Barton)

• Use Drupal .install file & forms api 'wizards' to test system reqs, find database(s), install tables and configure default settings (maybe look at using install profiles to auto-setup for common use-cases).

Reporting

• Evaluate options for integration with open-source report writers
• Allowing quick generation of reports under the "print" button
• It would be especially nice to be able to even have a "quick print" button of reports you use all the time (such as labels for mailing letters)

General Navigation / Usability improvements

• Initial implementation of user preference model. Will want to handle nav/display preferences, privacy preferences, etc.
• Make the Dashboard (start page) user-configurable (user-specific blocks)
• Support contact photo - and if not available larger icon to indicate gender.
• Most prominent contact info should map to communications preferences as well (so if prefers Phone, then phone number if prominent...).
• Allow custom fields to be edited/displayed within existing core fieldsets.
• Allow end-user to create a new Organization or Household quickly from the Create Relationships task flow (use case: I want to indicate that a contact is an employee of Foobar Org and realize that Foobar Org is not yet setup as an Org.contact).
• Visually differentiate contacts who are also 'users' and add "is/is not a CMS user" as a search criteria.
• Add "Previous" and "Next" contact in group navigation to contact detail screens to make it easy to browse through the contacts in a particular group.

CiviCRM Profile

• Profile forms: Auto-create relationship functionality (e.g. solicit info from a contact on Employer, Spouse or any other related contact)
• Support for viewing "transactional data" in Profiles (contributions, activity history...) - so that user can see their own "history".
• Allow Profile to override default templates (View, Search, Edit, Listings) specify a custom profile-specific templates.
• Provide alternative processes for handling the "contact already exists" case when an anonymous user is adding their contact information using a Profile form.

Export

• Export PRIMARY should include remaining core contact fields deceased, privacy (do not phone....), greeting, preferred
  comm method, as well as Tags and Groups. These should also be available for mapped (selective) exports.
• Export of objects beyond 'contacts' -> activities, relationships, etc

Import Data

• UI for Improving Import and Dedupe
• Allow import of comma-delimited list of tag values as a mapped field (each list item would be inserted as a tag assignment)
• Import of transaction data (Activities, Activity History)
• Optimize import processing
• Consider implementing batch processing alternative for larger files:
  0. stop any write action for this domain id (LOCK)
  1. analyze data and eliminate redundant / bad data
  2. convert data to a series of insert/update sql statements
  3. enter this file into mysql
  4. UNLOCK
• Create contact from vCard (singleton import) [Shot]
• Consider implementing user-guided process for importing possible dupes
  1. kick out possible import duplicates for manual review in step 2 (matching first/last, or last/zip, or email)
  2. workflow interface to review screenful of 'unlikely duplicates' and accept their input into DB
  3. workflow interface to review screen of 4-5 'likely duplicates' at a time, where the
  software would auto-fill a radio button to 'go with existing data' 'go with new data' 'merge' 'not a dupe' 'discard'
  4. workflow interface to review 1 record slated for a 'merge' at a time to allow nonprofit worker to manually determine which data to include.
• Allow the import and export of data by either the value OR the label. It would also be nice to search and/or query by both value or label

• When importing or exporting, ability to treat check box data as mutiple sets of "yes/no" data.
  For example right now we the mutiple-check-boxes to hold a series of volunteer preferences for individuals in our database. However, another database of ours (that we need to export to and import from) holds the same information as a series of "yes/no" options in different fields.

Volunteer Preferences:
Telephone canvassing: Yes
Foot canvassing: No
Office Work: No
Help out with Events: Yes

So CiviCRM stores these under one field that says "Telephone Canvassing, Help out with events" where our other database holds them under 4 fields that say "Yes" , "No" , "No" , "Yes"

So as you can see, importing and exporting between these two is kinda a pain.

Task/Project Management

• Add ToDo's (tasks), including ability to assign/allocate tasks to others, prioritize, link to other tasks. Consider linking multiple tasks to a meta entity (e.g. a Campaign...)
• Task Dashboard component(s):
  • view all your tasks, upcoming tasks, past-due tasks (list and calendar views)
  • quickly update status on one or more tasks
  • create new tasks associated w/ 0, 1 or many contacts
• Reminders function (not sure if needed - maybe just reminders block as above)
• Spec and implement 'Follow-up' activity
  • Should carry forward subject, location.. for meeting, etc.
  • Determine how follow-ups are linked in UI
  • Implement method for deleting activity (meeting/call/todo) records w/ follow-ups using a bottom-up tree (to avoid FKey errors)
• Schedule/log a call (improvements):
  • if no phone entries for this contact, hide phone drop-down
  • Include checkbox next to manual input phone number: [ x ] Save phone number for this contact (If checked, save in crm_phone as preferred phone for primary location)

    Use Case for Task Management (submitted by Osbert) At the moment I want to be able to ask my staff, directors and associates to think of people who might be interested in supporting us, and for each of them to enter the information they know about them into the CRM (contact details, interests, relationships etc - which CiviCRM looks well able to handle, along with info like 'don't contact direct, but I can approach them on your behalf)). I then want to be able to review these leads, allocate into groups (perhaps priority and/or interest and/or potential amount) and allocate tasks to myself and others (eg phone, write, prepare tailored application, do more research etc). And then after each activity I want to record the outcome and/or next task eg research done (see notes), call to arrange meeting, etc >>> donation of XXX pledged>> write with thanks etc. I think the key thing is that we'd want tasks that can be defined by an administrator, and can be allocated by one user to another user. Personally I'm not interested in recording the amounts given in a way that can produce reports (say total donations for project X from Jan - Mar 06) - that sort of information will come out the book keeping system.

• Ability to record activities to multiple users at the same time.

Groups

• Support for allowing visitors and/or authenticated users to control their membership in specific groups - join/leave (based on group-level properties)
• Sort group members by 'status'
• Support for Organic Groups model (self-organized groups, group 'leader' and other roles, etc.)
• add contacts to group by user role

Permissioning / Access Control

• Support for a range of visibility settings for contact info based on combination of admin-configured properties and contacts' own privacy preferences
• New permissions: View / Edit 'my own group(s)' - i.e. groups that I am a member of.
• Built-in permission to view/edit contacts which you have created (plus your own contact record?).
• Task-level permissioning (e.g. this role can 'send emails'). Re-architect permissioning - probably using ACL model.
• Solve the access control puzzle for New Contact/New Group. Issue is that if you don't have 'all contacts' view or edit permissions, you can create a contact but then they 'disappear' from your permission scope since they're not in a group you have access to.
• Default Group permissions: There should be default settings for group level permissions so that every time you create a group you do not have to go to access controls to change the group level permissions.
• Separate access control tab for civicrm module

Tagging Enhancements

• Tags can be associated w/ ALL objects, or specific object type(s) (use case-I have tags for different types of orgs, and want them only to be assignable to contact.organization objects).
• Allow grouping and hierarchies for tags.

External Application Interfaces

• Consider creating an SDK with developer doc, specific code examples of extending / building on top CiviCRM, etc.
• Consider REST APIs (see http://objectledge.org/confluence/display/CRM/API+RPC+Design+and+Implementation)

Framework Improvements

• Allow multiple selectors on same page (e.g. Page/Activity.php)
• Formalize error handling mechanisms for user error reporting vs. logging vs. email alerts, as well as error code taxonomy

CiviMail Improvements

• Mailings should be groupable. what i mean is that if you always do a "weekly news" mailing, you should be able to identify that mailing as of that type and then look at aggregate metrics, also sort and group mailing jobs.
• Send randomizer: ability to set up multiple versions of a message that will be sent at random to members of a group. Metrics would show open rates and click through rates for each distinct message version.
• Per message tokens: some way to create a message that pulls specific token data based on a user's criteria.
• Track URLs screws up when token replacement is in URL path
  • e.g., with contact.external_identifier set to the Drupal User ID, the line:

    Please log in and edit your personal information:
    http://{domain.name}/user/{contact.external_identifier}/edit/
    

    is expanded to: http://example.com/modules/civicrm/extern/url.php?q=1&u=2/edit/ which fails

  • a simple (non-optimal but general) fix is to be able to locally turn off Track URLs in segments of text
• why is a header required for civimailings? what if i don't want one?

Miscellaneous

• Integration/plugins for email client(s) - Outlook and/or POP3 webmail to allow sending and reading emails within CiviCRM.
• Zip+4 lookups
• Provide a way to delete a location for a contact (currently there is no way to do this except via API or direct DB query).
• Look at creating RSS/Atom feeds for some output (CiviCRM Profile listings, ??). Need to talk to community about expected use cases. [Shot]
• Contact Photos - Expose image_url property for contacts. Consider implementing a user hook to capture image URL when a photo is added for a user (or perhaps just do this w/ the user_synch script ?).