CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Good morning everyone. It's always tough getting into something new like this. Those "that know" are often over burdened by the questions from those that don't know. In any case I hope I find someone who has been refreshed by someone and has the passion to guide me in this effort to install CiviCRM for a street ministry I am trying to help.

Question 1:
I'm posting this in the Drupal Installation site, and I've done some research (like this one http://zenofnptech.org/2009/01/civicrm-and-drupal-joomla.html) but I'd appreciate if anyone "in the know" could tell me the advantages/disadatages of going down the Drupal, Joomla, or stand alone route of implementing and installing CiviCRM.

Question 2:
For reasons I won't go into here, the best solution for implementation will be to find a web host for them. Any hints or tips that can be offered in this are appreciated. Namely could you give me a few questions I should ask the hosting provider to be sure I can install CiviCRM with as few difficulties as possible?

Thanks and God bless!


... Timothy

Wow; sorry for not seeing this before. I have the forums forwarding to my email address and have even recently had some interactions with Lobo that have been very helpful.

In any case if anyone ever checks on this thread again for any useful information they should know that I went with a Resellers account with HostGator for cost reasons. My Drupal/CiviCRM installation is working fine so will give that decision a 'plus' for the NGO/nonprofit budget conscious.

However if the organization does grow to the point where they can throw a few more development dollars (pesos) into the tech budget I am certainly going to suggest that we go with a managed server solution in the future that gives us more access to the system. As Piotr alluded to, SSH access is a big plus. And if I had know about this before then I would have installed CiviCRM in a subdomain instead of the root of the website.

For the Reseller account that I have there is only one option for SSH; which is a "jailed SSH account". However if access to the files is the only issue then installing CiviCRM into a subdomain would have allowed me to at least set up Secure FTP access to give to the database administrator that I hired part time.

As it is I have to give that database administrator the primary username and pwd on the account to have them do anything.

Just a few tips from my experience so far. Hope this helps future thread browsers.

Love your quote! I suppose I would be considered schizophrenic then! God Bless to you as well. I just wanted to offer help. Any questions you have I would be more than happy to help. Just email me.

Wow; you are a Drupal 2.x user ... must be "old hat" by now.

Thanks for your offer to help and for your schizophrenia :-) You might see some posts from me in a couple of weeks when I get to trying to configure custom reports. I'll see how it goes; maybe I'll "get it" the first time around.

Hmm this brings to mind that this forum could use a "friends" list of some sort. I don't see any place to log people that I want to keep track of. Guess I'll have to do it manually.