CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

the below is not possible with CiviCRM on Joomla. You might want to check out the multi-site capabilities of CiviCRM via drupal. Note that this is still a fairly heavy weight solution (IMO) and more applicable to local chapters of state and national orgs

lobo

I'm also unclear about the relative pros and cons of using either groups or tags or custom fields to categorize contacts... and why I can't do what I want to do with Joomla and CiviCRM... because http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC/Database+Planning says, "Tags are the simplest form of categorization. Groups can be used for mailing lists and can be restricted via access control, or used to grant access. Custom fields can be used to store arbitrary data about your contacts."

This was what I had in mind when I said, in the original post in this thread, "At the lowest level, I want to have N groups, with one registered user assigned to each group.  That registered user should be able to log in, view/edit his group's data (i.e. create new contacts), send emails to the contacts in his group, etc., but *not* view/edit someone else's group data."

What I'm ultimately trying to do is use CiviCRM to provide a way for precinct chairs to keep track of the voters and volunteers in their respective precincts.  Ideally, "precinct" would map to one of the CiviCRM groups referred to in the previous paragraph -- and the Precinct N chair (a registered CiviCRM user) would only see "precinct N data" when (s)he logs in, i.e. not be able to see the Precinct N+1 chair's data.  But, since Precinct N is included in "state rep district M" (along with other precincts in district M), a registered CiviCRM user who is a member of the "state rep district M" group would be able to see precinct N data as well as data for the other precincts in district M. 

If anyone has done something similar to this, I'd like to learn from your experience.

I have a Joomla/Civi implementation. My experience/advice would be as follows:

1. Do you need Joomla? I do. The rest of my website is on it and it would be just too painful to move to Drupal. But if you're designing from scratch, consider Drupal because civi is just better integrated with it.
2. CiviCRM does have access control - in Drupal. Not in Joomla, and to be fair that's largely because Joomla 1.5 doesn't really have access control either (well, nothing properly configurable). J1.6 does, and hopefully in a few months time there will be a version of Civi with ACL that works with J1.6. But that's a while away yet.

So what can you do?

1. End users can see their own dashboard. (Joomla menu item, set to Registered only).
2. Dashboard functionality allows them to renew their membership.
3. End users can click through from their dashboard to the dashboard for their related contacts (if permissions set right in the relationship) - so you can edit your Household, children, whatever.
4. You can create profiles so that people can see and edit a lot of information about themselves, or if you dare, about all contacts or all contacts in a group (if fields are searchable and visible). However, since Joomla 1.5 has no decent access control, the menu links to those searches are limited only by public/registered/special. So you can have search and editable information about particular groups, but anyone with access to that link can get there: which is a Joomla ACL issue.  Perhaps a separate component like JUGA will help. I haven't tried. Because these are profiles, it only shows contact info (not membership etc info).
5. Essentially though, all meaningful admin activity has to be carried out via the back-end. That's a serious limitation, but to be fair to the Civi team, I think its mainly due to the shortcomings of J1.5. J1.6 should be better, as and when CiviCRM is updated to support it.

In Drupal there is a link between the standard groups component and Civi. There is no bridge/link between Community Builder/GroupJive (for example) and Civi. I think a lot of people would find that helpful.

Ed

I was able to "expose" some of what I needed from the CiviCRM backend via Joomla URL wrappers that are only accessible to registered users. This actually works well, in that I am able to maintain the same Joomla look-and-feel for every page on the site.

That said, I would like to keep the fact that I'm using CiviCRM hidden from my users, by changing the names of menu items etc. such as "CiviCRM" and "CiviMail" to something more generic, like "Contact Manager" and "Mail Manager".

I found where I can customize the CiviCRM navigation menu bar for my users, in Administration Console > Customize > Navigation Menu -- but while this changed the navbar as desired, it didn't change the Admin Console itself (i.e. I renamed "Administer > Customize > CiviCRM Profiles" to "Administer > Customize > Contact Profiles", but clicking on "Administration Console" still shows "CiviCRM Profiles" in the "Customize" section.

What I can't figure out is where I can change the "breadcrumb" and title text (e.g. above the "Configure your Dashboard" button), the CiviCRM text and logo above the "create new" drop-down on the left hand side, and the "Powered by CiviCRM" footer. 

Any ideas?

for 3.1 and prior you will need to do this via the translation engine (i.e. new po file etc) or via the custom translation function.

What's a po file, where does one find it, and how does one invoke the translation engine?