CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I know this seems like ancient history, but we have a high-traffic Drupal 5 site which is highly customized, and for various reasons we haven't been able to update it to Drupal 6 yet. We rely on CiviCRM and CiviMail for email blasts to site members.

We are using CiviCRM 1.9 on Drupal 5.

We recently added paid premium content functionality on the site, which is implemented by adding the user to a 'premium subscriber' role. We'd now like to be able to email these premium subscribers as a group through CiviMail. Somehow we need to get all the users in a Drupal role into a CiviCRM group for CiviMail.

I did a little research into our options. Here's what I've found:

http://drupal.org/project/civimember_roles has an older version (5.x-1.2) which is supposed to work with CiviCRM 1.9. But: "This module only synchronizes one way: CiviMember -> Drupal. This means that users with a specific role will not be given a CiviMember Membership Type. Only CiviCRM Contacts with specific Membership Types will be assigned a Drupal role."

Which is the opposite of what we need, so it looks like that's out. :-(

That module was merged into CiviCRM as of the 2.1 release (http://civicrm.org/node/464) and enhanced to allow 2-way syncing: "The other modules civicrm_group_roles does something similar with static groups. A user has a role added/removed whenever the user is added/removed from a CiviCRM group. This is a 2 way sync, so changes in a user role is reflected in the CiviCRM group, and changes to a CiviCRM group is reflected in the users role."

This seems like exactly what we need, however, CiviCRM 2.1 requires Drupal 6 :-(

So am I correct in thinking that we'll need to custom code this? Would we get any benefit upgrading to 2.0.x? Would love some guidance here.