As you know every school has its own particularities in regard to demographics of their students. Therefore I wish to make a few changes to the application form and student/user data.
Examples:
Changes to terminology, e.g. “Last name” instead of “Surname”
Remove fields, e.g. “Preferred Name”, “Official Name”, “Name in Characters”, “Citizenship”, etc.
Add fields, e.g. “Other names”, “Church”, etc.
How is this best achieved? Are there things I must be aware and particularly careful?
v12 has a new feature under Admin > System Admin where you can substitute interface strings, as they are displayed to users. So, for example, you can change “Surname” to “Last name”. v11 supports custom fields for users and the application form (under Admin > User Admin in the main menu, then Manage User Custom Fields in the module menu.
In terms of disabling fields, this is currently not possible.
The simplification of the application form is rather important to me. There are too many fields we don’t need.
I know it’s far from being ideal, but what do you think if for the mean time I hack the code and hide those fields not needed. Do you have a better idea?
Roman, you can do that, but some of them are required fields in the Manage Users, and so you may end up with records you cannot save due to insufficient information. That, and the next update will remove the changes. Feel free to play (it’s open source after all : ) but be cautious, as we will be less able to help you with knock on issues you create for yourself (due to a lack of time on our end).
We may look to simplify the form in a future version.
Yes, please post the list here, and we will see what we can do to implement it in v13. No promises, but will put it on the todo list, which gives it a 60-80% chance of getting done.
I am travelling for the next 4 weeks, and so not able to really get into this right now. I agree that the form could do to be reduced, but this must be done in a way that is optional, as some schools (such as my own) really do need these fields. Are you hoping to code some of this up yourself?
In my opinion, the table gibbonperson is rather congested. A step forward may be to make most of these fields so called custom fields leaving only the core attributes.
Roman, this is a question that there is most likely no one right answer to. In terms of database optimisation, I feel that having these fields as real SQL fields, as opposed to the non-SQL-field storage used for custom fields. In terms of interface, perhaps the option to disable certain fields would be better. In what way exactly is this causing problems for you?
I have studied other school solutions as well, e.g. school tool and centre sis. They also allow custom fields but use a different technique to store data. Both use real SQL fields instead of a serialized string, which may cause performance issues.
I wish Gibbon’s database structure could be lighter and more flexible.
So, in those systems, when you create a field, it uses SQL to set that field up as a real database field? Are the fields stored in a separate table, or in the same table as the inbuilt fields?
@admin@meierrom This seems to be the only post dealing with this. But it is old, is it now possible to change the terminology like as mentioned below in v19?
Hi Ross,
As you know every school has its own particularities in regard to demographics of their students. Therefore I wish to make a few changes to the application form and student/user data.
Examples:
Changes to terminology, e.g. “Last name” instead of “Surname”
Remove fields, e.g. “Preferred Name”, “Official Name”, “Name in Characters”, “Citizenship”, etc.
Add fields, e.g. “Other names”, “Church”, etc.
How is this best achieved? Are there things I must be aware and particularly careful?