Name of module is potentially un-user-friendly? [#1261178]

The reason I want to raise this is because we're talking about using this as the 'base' type for contacts in a CRM system. The most appropriate word for this, in my opinion, is 'contact' (it's pretty much a CRM staple, and what users of other CRMs would naturally expect), and I'm just a little worried that 'party' might be ambiguous.

I appreciate that http://drupal.org/project/contact might be a little difficult, but I'd be interested to hear thoughts on this "issue", if it is one in the first place.

Comments

Comment #1

yautja_cetanu commented 30 August 2011 at 12:39

My thoughts are that the "Party" is the base unit in the API but users would probably never see the word "Party". I wonder if "crm-api" would be a better name eventually?

I don't know if this idea is in line with joachim though.

Comment #2

rivimey

she/her

commented 22 September 2011 at 13:45

I think I agree that "party" is not necessarily a good user name, but it does have a wide enough scope for many of the uses to which it will probably be put. For example, in another context I'm considering an academic papers database, which will have editors and authors - both of which could be parties but neither are "contacts" in the normal sense.

I did wonder if "partie" may be a better (non-)word than "party", as the strange spelling may eliminate pre-conceived notions relating to the other fun-n-games or politics meanings of "party".

Comment #3

spencerfromsc commented 27 September 2011 at 23:07

Just saw this and I have to agree with Chris. "Contact" is a pretty generic term across the CRM universe, whereas I think a significant portion of users need an explanation of the term "Party". This should be a red flag. You're probably SOL on the contact namespace, but there's no reason there couldn't be a crm-specific naming convention for all of the associated modules, in this case "crm_contact".

Comment #4

rivimey

she/her

commented 8 October 2011 at 21:55

I think the reason for considering names other than "contact" is that, while this module will hopefully be used for traditional CRM (in which "contact" is indeed core), I expect it will be used in many more contexts as well. Hence the thought that using a word loaded with past baggage may not be helpful.

Oh, and also that I expect many of those using the module in Drupal will not have traditional CRM backgrounds.

Comment #5

joachim commented 9 October 2011 at 07:23

Indeed; and applications built with this module can use hook_entity_info_alter() to change the UI label of the Party entity to something that makes more sense for their particular case.

Comment #6

yautja_cetanu commented 10 October 2011 at 08:51

Rivimey can you think of any contexts where something other then "contact" would describe something in our system?

One example I think I thought of is "family". It would make sense if you're a church where each individual was a contact, but we also had "families" which were party entity types. These would be related to our contacts to group them but they themselves wouldn't necessarily be a contact (although they could be).

However I think it would be splitting hairs to say this family isn't a contact. It isn't technically but its a thing used to group contacts so I don't think it would be particularly unintuitive to call everything a contact in this situation.

Can you think of any other situations where "contact" would not be a good name?