CiviCRM is a stellar example of how technology and internet have emerged as crucial components in improving the efficiency of organisations. From non-profits to governments, CiviCRM has helped people manage their workflow effortlessly. A vibrant community and open-source nature of the project have made sure it adapts and evolves to keep up with diverse needs of organisations around the world.
Google Summer of Code 2014 (GSoC), recently announced by Google, is another opportunity for CiviCRM to forward this cause. An initiative to support open source software projects, it pairs prospective students with organisations for a summer of coding. CiviCRM has been selected as a mentoring organisation for GSoC 2014 and I am a CS undergrad from India looking forward to code for CiviCRM this summer.
The project I am going to submit- “Bootstrap for CiviCRM” aims to integrate the popular open source front-end framework Bootstrap with CiviCRM.
User Interface/User Experience (UI/UX) over the years have defined the user’s interaction with applications. With multiple mobile centric devices and evolving web standards, concepts like responsive design, mobile-first approach and minimalism have come to dominate the design landscape. In this context, CiviCRM needs a new approach to interfaces. Joomla!, WordPress & Drupal the CMSes that CiviCRM integrates with have all implemented responsive interfaces based on HTML 5, CSS 3 and modern design principles.
Bootstrap framework offers some inherent advantages in terms of efficiency, scalability and community support. Developed initially by Twitter, it enjoys extensive support in terms of documentation and active contributors. A showcase of apps built with Bootstrap here gives a picture of the flexibilities it has to offer.
Some advantages that I could immediately identify with are:
- CSS - With uniform class and id nomenclature, much confusion over styling can be eliminated. This greatly helps during customization.
- Uniform Experience - By implementing an even more uniform interface across various platforms, life gets much easier going forward for development of new features. We can harness the single front-end framework for rapid development.
- New Use Cases - The new framework gives scope to develop many new interface elements that are more navigable. Long, clunky forms in MailBlast UI will replaced by slicker elements for convenience of user. I came across another discussion on User Tour which will be implemented.
- Extension - The uniform interface also provides scope to implement out-of-box customizations like Themes etc.,
There is of course, one downside to making the shift. This might break the code of some prevailing extensions. The project, if taken up will be implemented only by August 2014. I feel this might give enough time to make changes to existing extensions to be compatible with the new framework.
I would very much appreciate your feedback on this issue. I claim no expertise on this and am looking forward for a dialogue with the community.
You can comment on this blog post or a post on the Developer Discussion thread here.