CiviCRM and Drupal Commerce - mixed products and a unified checkout

[Upperholme]

I'm looking at a couple of projects currently where it would be great to be able to sell a CiviCRM membership alongside a physical product, and enable the user to checkout just the once with a single transaction. My reading and research so far has led me in the direction of Drupal Commerce, Eileen's CiviCRM Entity module, possibly Webform CiviCRM Integration. It feels like it might be possible using this mix to be able to offer a CiviCRM event or membership alongside a Drupal Commerce product.

But then you come across the issue of checking out. Maybe if we could use Drupal Commerce to checkout we might be able to leverage Rules or somesuch to tell CiviCRM about the transaction.

I'm almost certain that I can't be the only one that would like to do this sort of thing, so I'm posting this to put my hand up and ask for input form anyone else that is looking at a similar situation, or better yet anyone that has got something working. It's possible that there may be some funding available to do some work on this if need be, as it feels like this would be valuable to a number of organisations.

[petednz]

Hi Graham - have you taken a look at https://drupal.org/project/commerce_civicrm - you don't make reference to it

We have had a client using ubercart with civicrm and have made a bunch of improvements to that due to needs such as being able to store new addresses for a user in a 'spare' location type fieldset so that they don't have direct right to overwrite their civi address - both for 'quality of data' issues and becuase there have just been to many instances of a user buying a 'gift' and sticking in the recipient's address and overwriting their own.

We also looked at commerce_civicrm for another client but getting through all the issues we identified was beyond their budget and hence we pulled the level of integration back a notch or two. issues included (from memory)  how to handle people needing to buy multiple years of membership, changing membership type etc


hopefully we can use our experience with uc-civi and com-civi to help you navigate through the commerce integration and come out with a robust and useable module.

[Upperholme]

Thanks petednz. I did take a look at this module a while back, and at that point it was giving PHP warnings and suchlike, but I see that it's been updated since. I'll take a fresh look and see where its at, and what we might be able to achieve with it, and may well come back to you.

[jakecivi]

Anyone have any experience with this since? pretendz, is there more information available about what you did with ubercart? I have a client with a bunch of existing role-based recurring memberships in Ubercart, and we want to make that information available as memberships in Civi too.

[petednz]

ha ha - pretendz - what a great nick name for me 

in most situations where we have any integration going between Civi and eiter Ubercart or Commerce our preference now is to work directly via Rules rather than with the modules because of the state of their upkeep and general approach

[jakecivi]

Ha!

[prdsutte]

there is a patch for the drupal commerce civicrm module.
see the issue queue of that module.
i don't exactly know wich patch is was, but it worked for us.