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