Follow-up to my question about engaging with the CiviCRM community: https://forum.backdropcms.org/forum/civicrm-support-and-community-engage...
I love the power and flexibility of CiviCRM and I love how supportive the CiviCRM community has been with Backdrop CMS. But, frankly I'm a bit discouraged by the user experience with CiviCRM and have a really hard time recommending it to folks who are not already using it.
For site editors managing data in CiviCRM is a pretty ugly experience, not to metion confusing and overwhelming, once you get into the settings.
Are there things I can do to improve this "editor" experience? Are their alternative themes or skins for the CiviCRM UI?
Is there anything for me to look forward to in terms of possible improvements in the user experience?
Comments
There are CiviCRM themes that look better than the default that you can install from the extensions. But there will also soon be a new theme option included in CiviCRM core also. If you install a theme you need to enable it on the display settings page, near the bottom.
I also always go to the Backdrop Appearance settings and choose the option for the CiviCRM admin pages also use the Backdrop admin theme. You may need to enable the CiviCRM theme Backdrop module, which is included with the main CiviCRM module.
All a bit confusing, if you don't know what you're looking for. However, this will help it look a lot better.
By the way, I tend to use https://civicrm.org/extensions/finsbury-park-cross-cms-admin-theme. And will continue to use until the new theme is in core.
When you've enabled civicrmtheme, on the bottom of
admin/appearancethere is this setting:And on the CiviCRM side, there's the additional theme settings for just the CiviCRM elements:
civicrm/admin/setting/preferences/display?reset=1If there are no other backend themes listed you can install one from
civicrm/admin/extensions?reset=1(Add new button). And then go back to the display settings and choose a backend theme (and front end if you like).Then you can acheive something like this:
This inspired me to make a PR to mere the civicrmtheme functionality into the main CiviCRM-Backdrop module: https://github.com/civicrm/civicrm-backdrop/pull/184. Please test it. It's working for me, including the upgrade path.
Thanks for all this info @herb. I was pretty sure I heard something about themes for CiviCRM, but have yet to try them out. I'll look into this and test your change to the civicrm module.