Ideas

Improved usability with CiviCRM contribution forms

We've been working with one of our clients to rebuild the way they capture membership information, both new and renewing. One of the requirements is to allow potential members to signup for access to forums, comments, subscriptions, etc. The goal is to provide the user with a smooth, logical process to create an account and if they choose, to become a member. CiviCRM provides this functionality through the configuration of a contribution page. The same form can be used for new and renewing members, seamlessly allowing them to create a Drupal account while capturing important pieces of data with custom fields linked to their CiviCRM contact record.

When a potential new member signs up for an account, they are presented with a "No Thank You" option. This allows them to skip the contribution and continue to create a Drupal user account. They are then required to enter $0.00 in the contribution amount, skip the billing information and proceed with signup by way of a $0 contribution. We found this process clumsy and confusing to the end user.

We spent about 15 minutes digging into the template and wrote a few lines of jQuery to improve that usability. When a user selects "No Thank You", the contribution amount textfield is hidden, set to $0.00 and the billing information is also hidden since those fields aren't required. It works great and cleans up the interface by only presenting the user with only the necessary fields for account creation.

The patch we generated is attached to CRM-7556 on issues.civicrm.org. We filed the issue with hopes that it will get accepted into CiviCRM 3.4. At the very least, it provides a record and option for others to extend into their own CiviCRM installations. Be sure to follow the wiki on creating custom templates and apply the patch against that rather than hack the core template file directly.