CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

We are using Joomla and have the need to display our member Directory on the front end of our site. I see in the manual that it is possible using Drupal but not Joomla v1.5. We would also like to have each registered member to be able to view and edit his own profile after he/she joins our association. Is this possible. Can do need a Joomla programmer to help us or could our website designer possibly do this?

Thank you in advance for your help.

I'm basically in the same position as krankie and would echo his comments.

You start by asking about displaying the member directory. You can do this, or at least something almost identical. If you have a group which all your members belong to (i.e. a smart group which selects all contacts with memberships in the valid states) then you can do a profile search form and (because it allows wildcards) you can see the complete membership list. Depending how you set the profiles up, a user could see quite a lot about other users, search by locality etc.

However, as krankie says I don't think they can then edit, except their own. On that topic:

1. Users will have their Dashboard which shows part of their information. The Dashboard provides a route to see some information held about you, including (depending how permissions have been done) your households and related contacts. This can be a bit hit and miss, and isn't a coherent way to view information or edit it, but is useful for many things.
2. If you let users edit their information, be careful what you let them edit. CiviCRM has no logging system, and so if you let them edit their name you can get very confused because then you will have a name for one contact but partial information about others and no way to detect what got changed. I'd therefore recommend that for editing your profile you don't let them change their name.

I think you can do this in theory, as follows:

1. Create the profile that all your civi users will be directed to to edit. In the settings for that profile, select the option which requires them to create a Joomla account. *
2. Send them all an email via CiviMail, with a link to that profile which will be prefilled for them. See checksum tokens http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC/Mail-merge+Tokens+for+Contact+Data here about that one.

They should then be able to click on that link, be taken to the profile with their info, update it, join Joomla and you're done.

*However, I think that this feature isn't working in 3.1.4. I asked on this forum about it http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,13711.0.html and Lobo appeared to agree that it didn't work. I don't know whether it got filed as a bug and/or it works for you but I'd be interested to know.

Presumably however you first populate the Joomla users (and I suppose those pw's have to be hashed) you create a copy of each password as a Civi Custom Data field. That field you can email out easily enough, and it need not be visible to the user ever again.

For these users;
1. They can either be directed to a profile which has nothing for them to enter other than the Joomla signup or they can edit all their data at that step (if it works at all, obviously), whichever you think is easier for them.
2. The Joomla signup confirmation email is useful for checking that the person isn't a spammer and typed their address right. However, you can activate users who haven't clicked on the link from the backend (and presumably via a general SQL query too, if you're not up for 4,700 manual bypass operations).

However, getting them to ever log in again is a challenge!

Regarding your scenario: you have lots of imported CiviCRM contacts, but only a few Joomla users and you want everyone to login and update their details.  To accomplish this:

1) Create a CiviCRM profile that contains the fields you want people to see/update.  Configure the profile to require a Joomla login.

2) Create a Joomla menu item of type "CiviCRM -> Edit Profile "  . Restrict this menu item to "registered"

3) email the hyperlink to the new page out to the masses.

4) The moment a logged in user submits the profile, their existing CiviCRM contact record will be updated.  If there is not a "matching" contact record, a new contact record will be created.  ( Matches are based on the settings in the CiviCRM dedup global settings ). The default rule for matches is email address only. 


  This does not require any coding to solve. To