Fixing the right problem

This week I heard from a client who had been banging his head against the wrong problem.

I'm guessing it took hours out of his Friday afternoon.

What he saw was that a certain set of custom fields was not displaying on his contribution page.

What could be causing that?

• Permissions?

• ACLs?

• Something about the configuration of the fields?

• The custom field group?

• The profile?

• The contribution page?

• The WordPress theme?

• Some bug in CiviCRM?

It took me awhile to understand exactly what he was seeing.

He had written me several very brief emails asking about how custom fields work, how they might conflict with the theme, and several other potential causes that he was considering.

Finally, he gave me the URL to the page.

Within a few minutes I wrote him back with an explanation of the real problem:

One of his extensions was hiding those fields.

His response was wonderful:

That was frustrating! ... Smh

Cheers for that…I would have torn the whole car apart before I checked for gas!

I see two lessons here:

1. When asking for help, there's no substitute for a very detailed description of the problem (with screenshots and live URLs if possible).

2. When something goes wrong, the are any number of potential causes. Fortunately there are usually a few simple steps you can take to eliminate a large portion of those possibilities, so you can focus on the ones that remain.

I'll write more about that second point tomorrow.

All the best,
A.