Not understanding CMS (Drupal) + CiviCRM integration

[JMM]

Hi,

I am a bit new with Drupal and CiviCRM (and not a developper)

Where can I find some documentation or information about CMS (Drupal) + CiviCRM integration and synchronisation, and the way they work together ?

For instance :

I see that when a Visitor creates an account in Drupal, this also creates a Contact in CiviCRM ; but :

• - If I (Admin) delete a contact in CiviCRM, will it be deleted in Drupal ? and vice-versa ? Can I tune that ? Where ?
• - If I import contacts in CiviCRM (via a csv file), will they be created in Drupal at the same time ? If not, how can I synchronize with Drupal accounts ?

All this must be documented somewhere ?

[joanne]

Have you looked at the Website Integration section of our user and admin book http://book.civicrm.org/user/current/website-integration/choosing-your-cms/ ?

[JMM]

Thank you Joanne for your quick answer

Yes, I read this book, but it contains only 4 lines about my concern.

I also read the next one, specific to Drupal, which provides a lot of info, but not related to my specific user/contact hooking and synchronisation.

[petednz]

If I (Admin) delete a contact in CiviCRM, will it be deleted in Drupal ? and vice-versa ? Can I tune that ? Where ?[/li][/list]

No. We did some work on CiviCRM entities and using VBO - using View Bulk Operations - which is on my list to write up as a blog but I expect I already covered in the forum somewhere but doubt i posted the Views to github yet.

If I import contacts in CiviCRM (via a csv file), will they be created in Drupal at the same time ? If not, how can I synchronize with Drupal accounts ?

Not out of the box. We have covered this in two approaches. One is via Drupal Rules being triggered by a Civi entity - such as getting a Tag. (and there is an extensive blog about that here https://civicrm.org/blogs/petednz/creating-drupal-users-made-easy-single-or-multiple-contacts-civi-imports-and-webforms.

Second approach is to do the import in to Drupal first and then import other info via CiviCRM but does require careful use of the duplicate matching rules in civi to ensure the correct record gets updated.

I think you are right that the documentation is not great but that is because CiviCRM doesn't handle this out of the box and hence users like us cook up something but it doesn't become part of the core project and hence the documentation.

If you can suggest some improvements for the documentation I am sure someone (?) will do their best to get it updated.

[JMM]

Hi Petednz,

Thank you for your extensive answer.
I will make some testing of both approaches (which may require a few days, because I am not 100% on this), and will come back to you.

If I succeed, I may suggest some documentation improvement on this subject, but your post + the included link could already be a good one.

Thanks again.

[JMM]

Hi Petednz,

For Contact importation, the simpler the better :
1. I import name + mail in Drupal (using Feeds) (with mail unicity) : this import also creates related contacts in Civi
2. I import all the complimentary info in CiviCRM, with "Email" unsupervised dedupe rule and Update option
Since Drupal requires mail unicity, it works quite well (tested on just a few contacts, but I see no reason why it could not work on hundreds or thousands).

I have now a better understanding :
- when you create a User in Drupal (for logging purposes), this automatically creates a Contact in CiviCRM (which you can then edit in Civi, being logged in Drupal).
- now, when you delete a User in Drupal, you cannot access anymore to it in Civi (except as  an admin)
- when you delete a contact in Civi but keep it in Drupal, you can still re-create it in Civi, using the Civi Synchronization feature