CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Sorry for the vague title.  I've just started using CiviCRM - running it under Joomla, to create a site for an association of natural health practitioners.  At first it looked great, but I quickly started running into all sorts of problems.

Even after hours of reading documentation and searching Google I am still stuck.  I'm sure there must just be some fundamental thing I'm doing wrong.  Here's a short list of some of my biggest problems / questions...

1. How do I give extra functionality to admin staff, without giving them access to the Joomla backend?  For example ordinary practitioners can update their own basic profile, but admins should be able to update anyone's.  I want to provide this in the front end - not by giving them access to all of Joomla / CiviCRM.

2. How do I EXCLUDE records from search results. Basic practitioner details (name, address, ...) are visible/searchable for the public, BUT some practitioners want their information kept private - I.e. only accessible by admins.

3. How can you JOIN results in a search?  Some practitioners work in multiple clinics.  I would have liked to create each clinic as an Organisation and each pracititioner as an Individual, with the appropriate relationships between the two.  But when I did this, then I couldn't get a decent looking search result.  Searching on Organization was no good because I couldn't search by practitioner name, and searching by Inidividual wasn't any good, because all the contact details (address, etc) were in the Organization.

Any help or direction on these would be much appreciated!

Thanks for the feedback.

I am using profiles, but I don't really see how I can exclude those that want to not be published.  Is there some way to have a field in the search criteria that has a fixed value and is hidden?

I've spent so much time on this already, that I could've probably just coded everything I need in PHP.  I haven't completely abandoned the hope of using CiviCRM, but it's almost time to cut my losses.

I do appreciate you taking the time to reply though.

1. How do I give extra functionality to admin staff, without giving them access to the Joomla backend?  For example ordinary practitioners can update their own basic profile, but admins should be able to update anyone's.  I want to provide this in the front end - not by giving them access to all of Joomla / CiviCRM.

CiviCRM in Joomla does not implement fine grained permissioning (hopefully joomla 1.6 acl's will resolve this issue). The above use case is much better handled with Drupal + CiviCRM

2. How do I EXCLUDE records from search results. Basic practitioner details (name, address, ...) are visible/searchable for the public, BUT some practitioners want their information kept private - I.e. only accessible by admins.

If you are using profiles to expose data, then you can use the "limit listings by group" feature to include only those practitioners who've opted in. You can store this information in a custom field and use a smart group for it

3. How can you JOIN results in a search?  Some practitioners work in multiple clinics.  I would have liked to create each clinic as an Organisation and each pracititioner as an Individual, with the appropriate relationships between the two.  But when I did this, then I couldn't get a decent looking search result.  Searching on Organization was no good because I couldn't search by practitioner name, and searching by Inidividual wasn't any good, because all the contact details (address, etc) were in the Organization.

You might want to build a custom search for the above use case. I suspect you want to handle these 2 conditions:

a. given an organization(s) gimme all the individuals associated with the org
b. given an individiuals(s) gimme all the clinics associated with the indiv

lobo

That's not quite what I'm after.  I really just want users to be able to search for a practitioner name, or location etc, they should then see a result that shows a line for each practitioner / clinic that matches the criteria.  So for example if I search for "Mary" I might get...
Mary Smith, Hope Clinic, Summervale ...
Mary Smith, Sunshine Clinic, Georgetown ...
Mary Jones, Spring Clinic, Valley Heights ...

Whereas if I search for location "Summervale" then I get...
Mary Smith, Hope Clinic, Summervale ...
Bob Brown, Treeline Clinic, Summervale ...

I had tried just merging the data to do away with the organizations altogether, but this meant that an actual practitioner might have 2, 3 or more Individual records.  This then causes problems with trying to relate that to users.

Any thoughts?

For the above use case i think it might be easiest / fastest to write a custom search:

http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC/Custom+Search+Components

lobo

i made a mistake, to expose things in the front end u will need to create a civireport (similar to custom search), instructions here:

http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC/CiviReport+structure+and+customization

reports can be exposed to the anonymous user (they have permissioning associated with it). Note that you need to be pretty proficient with php/mysql to write a report. ping us on irc if u need help

lobo