The “No Overwrite” extension

Yesterday I told you how the No Overwrite extension solved a client’s mysterious “name change” issue, and that the extension deserves a write-up of its own.

Here it is.

This extension aims to solve one problem and one problem only:

The accidental renaming of one contact to another.

People very rarely change their name, but they often take action on behalf of others.

If they called you on the phone and said they wanted to register an employee — or a child, or a spouse — for an upcoming event, you’d make sure to create a new contact for that other person.

But when they take that action in an online form, they'll sometimes just change the first and last name from their own to someone else's.

Anytime CiviCRM is pre-populating the form with the user's own information, it assumes that the user knows what they're doing.

But when the users actually rename themselves to a completely different person, you've now got a very confusing situation.

The No Overwrite extension solves this in a very elegant way:

Where CiviCRM pre-populates the user’s first and last name, this extension ensures those fields are read only.

So they can't change their own name. At all.

Sure, people do sometimes change their names.

But it's very rare — much more rare than goofing up your data accidentally when they take action on behalf of another person.

If you're not using this extension, I recommend you give it a try. You can find it in CiviCRM’s Manage Extensions page.

There's nothing to configure. Just install it, and it just works.

And try it, and you don't like it, you can just disable it again.

But I don't think you will.

All the best,
A.