How to create a new contact type other than "Individual", "Household", or "Organization"?

Question

Sorry if this is not the best place to ask or if I sound vague, I am very new to CiviCRM and would be grateful for any advice I can get.

I am using CiviCRM for a local nonprofit animal shelter. Currently I have the pets stored as an "Individual" subtype, and added a custom field group for Pet Details that I basically would want to replace the "Contact Details" section, since none of that information is relevant to a pet. I'm starting to think that a better course of action would be to somehow create an entire new contact type just for pets.

My options are to either try to hide the "Contact Details" section of the pet subtype, or create a whole new Contact Type just for pets. I'm not sure how to go about doing this or if there is even a way to do this without editing the core code of Civi.

Thanks in advance, any advice is greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

it may be also worth familiarising yourself with what https://github.com/civicrm/org.civicrm.contactlayout can do in terms of changing the configuration of the Summary Screen. It allows you option of creating multiple layouts but i don't recall if they can be contact sub-type specific but am pretty sure it does

ah yes

Managing Multiple Layouts The "Show" option can specify a contact type, e.g. if a layout is specifically designed for Organization contacts rather than Individuals.

Answer 2

You can't create a new Contact type at the level of Individual/Household/Organisation (although most things are possible with enough code!).

However, you can create subtypes of those, so you could create subtypes of Individual as Pet and Human. For the Pet subtype you can create custom fields relevant to them and with the Contact Layout extension that Pete mentioned you can customise what gets displayed.

The Human subtype is optional - if you use it, you want to ensure all people have that subtype which is a complication, but on the other hand when you search it is easier to specify subtype=human than trying to exclude those with subtype=pet.