Where to modify billing information form ≥ 4.6?

Question

One of the first things we're asked to change in any installation is the billing block:

Nothing too fancy, just some changes to layout and labels, usually yielding something along the lines of

This was for a long time a simple matter of copying BillingBlock.tpl to create a custom template (customtemplates/CRM/Core/BillingBlock.tpl), as indicated in the wiki. But the hard-coded billing fields were removed in 4.6, and instead we they are printed out from the $billingDetailsFields array.

While I can't fault this from a technical perspective, I do wonder what would be the best practice as far as manipulating the layout and order for this form goes now. In the override template, would we remove the for block and output the old fields one by one? Is there a place where these values can be changed in the db or even through the admin UI?

Answer 1

Your best option is to do what you were doing previously.

However, you will need to modify your customized template to extract details from the $billingDetailsFields array rather than the hard coded fields. I suspect the names are the same, so the translation should be relatively simple. You can use smarty debug to get more details on the contents of the array.

Answer 2

I would think the previous billingblock.tpl could still be a basis. All the individual fields are still assigned to the template (as required), it's just that an array of fields to show is assigned too ... & this is iterated through to show the fields.

Your layout DOES look better :-)