From http://wiki.vtiger.com/archives

Hompage

About

Homepage is the first screen or startpage displayed when a user is logged in to vtigerCRM. It provides the main menu and starting point for the rest of the content in the device. It can be customized to make user-friendly by displaying the various information in the different widgets.

Features

The vtigerCRM homepage has been revamped and it is even more customizable now. The following features are provided :

• Newer widget types (like RSS and notebook).
• Ability to create/delete new widgets on the fly.
• The content for the widgets on the home page are now ajax loaded.
• The widgets have all new actions like refresh, hide/delete and settings for customization.
• You can change the widget layout dynamically.
• Consistent layout for all widgets (including tag cloud and activities).

Different types of widgets

There are the following widget types available in vtiger for now:

• Default widgets – We have 15 default widgets for vtiger homepage. These are:

1. Upcoming Activities – This widget will display the upcoming activities for the user for the day.The Admin Users can able to view all Upcoming activities for the day regardless to whom ever it is assigned to
   
2. Pending Activities – This widget displays the pending activities for the user for the day. The Admin Users can able to view all Pending activities for the day regardless to whom ever it is assigned to
3. Top Accounts – This widget displays the top accounts for you. A top account is one with the highest amount and for which the related potentials sales stage is not Closed Won/Closed Lost.
4. Home Page Dashboard – This widget displays the number of leads, accounts, contacts etc that are available (or assigned) for the current user. This widget is hidden by default. Check the show/hide widgets section for details on how to enable this widget.
5. Top Potentials – This widget displays the top potentials for the user. The criteria for a top potential is that it has the highest amount and it's sales stage is not Closed Won/Closed Lost.
6. Top Quotes – This widget displays the top quotes for the user. A quote is a top quote if it has maximum total and the quote stage is not ejected/Accepted. Valid Till field must be greater than or equal to current Date.
7. Key Metrics – This widget displays the custom filters that have been marked to be shown in key metrics, and the module and the number of records for the filter(s).
8. Top Trouble Tickets – This widget displays the top trouble tickets for the user.The criteria for a trouble ticket to appear here is that, it's status should not be closed.The order of the tickets depends upon the status.The tickets with status Open will come first,then the tickets with status In Progress  and then tickets with status Wait For Response.
   
9. My Group Allocation – This widget displays the records allocated to the group(s) of the user.
10. Top Sales Orders - This widget has all the sales orders which have a due date greater than or equal to the current date ordered by amount, descending.
11. Top Invoices – This widget displays the top invoices for the user. These are ones with highest total and status not as Paid.
12. My New Leads – This widget displays the new leads for the user. The criteria for a new lead is that it should not be Lost Lead/Junk Lead.
13. Top Purchase Orders - This widget has all the purchase orders which have a due date greater than or equal to the current date ordered by total (descending).
14. My Recent FAQs – This widget shows the most recent FAQs for the user which don't have status Obsolete.
15. Tag Cloud – This widget displays the tags available for the current user.

• Custom Widgets – vtigerCRM gives you the ability to add four different types of custom widgets. These are:

1. Module – This type of widget gives you the ability to see the contents of any module in a listview format in the homepage. You can use any available filters for the module to create the widget contents. The number of columns in the widget is limited up to two.
2. RSS – You can add live RSS feeds to vtiger using this type of widget. The contents of the RSS feed are displayed in the widget.
3. Dashboard – You can add custom dashboard type widgets for vtigerCRM homepage using this option. The dashboard type widgets have a default width of two columns. All the dashboards present in the vtigerCRM dashboards module can be used here as widgets.
4. Notebook – You can create a notebook type widget in vtigerCRM. This gives you the capability to add/edit your notes on the fly to vtiger. Refer to the documentation on vtiger Notebook widget for more details on this.

Please refer to the add widgets section in this documentation on how to add these custom widgets.

Show/ Hide Widgets

The default widgets in vtigerCRM can be shown/hidden using My Preferences.

• Click on the My Preferences link present on the left of the Sign-out link on the top right of the page.
• In the upcoming page, click on the Edit button on the top of the page to edit the preferences.
• Then, under the Home Page Components section, you will find the default widgets listed. The tag cloud widget can be found in the Tag Cloud Display section under this.
• Click the radio buttons here to show/hide the widgets and
• Save your preferences using the Save button on the either end of the page.

Add Widgets

vtigerCRM provides you the ability to add custom widgets on the fly to the homepage. To do this,follow the steps below:

• Go to the home page for vtiger. You have an add button there in the buttons list section.
• Click on the Add button to bring up the dropdown menu with options to create the different types of widgets.
  • Module type widget – For this click on the module link in the dropdown menu. You will get a popup like:
    • The window title is a mandatory field. This is displayed as the title of the widget.
    • Select the number of items to be displayed in the widget. This can be changed later using Edit action. For more details about different actions possible on widgets, please refer the “New Actions for widgets” section.
    • The third field is a Module select dropdown, where you can select the module for which you want to create the widget.
    • The fourth field lets you select the filter for the module (by default the All filter is selected for any module).
    • The fifth field in the popup is a multi-select box where you can select the columns for the widgets (please note that the limit for this is two columns for now).
    • After filling up the necessary details, click on the Save button to create the widget.
      
  • RSS type widget – This is the second option in the create widget dropdown menu.Clicking on this brings up a popup like:
    
    • The first field here is the Window title (this is a common field across all widgets ).
      
    • The second field lets you select the number of records that you want to see in the widget.
      
    • The third field lets you enter the RSS feed URL for the widget.
  • Dashboard type widget – This is the third option in the create widget dropdown menu.Clicking on this brings up a popup like:
    
    • The second field in the list lets you select the dashboard from the Dashboard module. And
    • The third field lets you specify the dashboard type (horizontal, vertical, or pie chart).
  • Notebook type widget – This is the last type of custom widgets available in vtiger. Click on this option to bring up a popup like:
    
    • Just enter the title and click on Save to create the notebook type widget. For more information on notebook type widgets, please refer to the vtiger Notebook documentation.

Ajax Loading Widgets

The contents for widgets on the homepage are now ajax loaded. This means that each of them is a separate loading page and does not hog the loading of the home page (or other widgets). This means performance improvement on the whole. So, if you have a widget with a huge dataset, it would not affect the loading of the other widgets. Moreover all widgets are displayed only if they have some data, i.e. if there is no data for a widget, the widget itself would not be displayed. For example, if you don't have any recent activities, you don't get the widget(s) for that.

New Action For Widgets

All widgets have some action buttons with them, which give a basic level of customizability on the widgets.A widget has six actions related to it for now:

• Edit – This button lets you edit the number of records to be displayed in a widget. On clicking this button you get a popup window where you can select the number of items that you want in the widget and click on Save. This will give that many items in that widget for you. This option will not be present for tagcloud, the dashboard, the notebook, and the RSS type widgets.
• Refresh – This button lets you reload the contents of the widget without reloading the page.A loading icon is displayed to show the reloading.
• Hide – This button is only available for the default widget types. This is a shortcut to hide the default widgets. Hidden widgets can be restored from the My Preferences page. Please refer to the section on Show/Hide widgets for more information.
• Close – This is only available for the custom type widgets. This button lets you delete a custom widget. Once deleted widgets cannot be restored.
• Scroll Link – This link is useful for widgets which have more horizontal data (like dashboard). For e.g. In a default dashboard widget if the size of the image is more than width of the widget, some data will be missing. Here, clicking on the scroll link will provide scrollbars for the widget, which can be used to scroll (vertically as well as horizontally) across the widget to access the data.
• More Link – This link is present on the bottom right of a widget and can be used to go to the listview of the concerned module. The view in this case is automatically set to the filter used in the widget. This link is not present for widget types dashboards, notebook, RSS, Tag Cloud, Group Allocation and Key Metrics.

Change The Widget Layout

You can change the home page layout, i.e. the number of widgets per rows on the homepage, by clicking on the change layout icon on the top right of the home page.Clicking on this will bring a popup like:

• Select the number of columns that you want to display per row on the home page and click on Save.

The changes will take place immediately and the page reloaded.