CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

hi,
i don't know whether we need multi-site, multi-org or both and I am hoping that someone will provide guidance if I describe what we need.

we have a sub-domain called region1.star.org and it has one drupal database and one civicrm database.

at present, the civicrm database for region1.star.org contains contacts and users (staff) only for the regional office, but we need a setup that will accommodate the contacts from the "area" offices that are "governed" by the regional office.  So the tree would look like this:

Region1
Office1
Office2
etc...

a staff person who logs into region1.star.org at the regional level should have full control over all the contact groups in every office.
a staff person who logs into region1.star.org at the Office level should have full control only for the contacts in their group(s).

Questions are:
1. do we need the Drupal multi-site installation with the multi-org configuration "on top"?
2. do we need to establish sub-domains for every office or could we use the Drupal "directory based" setup instead?
3. do we need separate Drupal databases for every office?
4. can we use one civicrm database that is shared by the regional office and its affiliated area offices?
5. can you offer any tips on how best to get this done?

we will contribute back the documentation if we can figure out how to get this to work for us and any help will be greatly appreciated.

thanks,
cynthia

hi there peter  

first of all, thank you for the response. It is much appreciated.

i'd like to provide more detail about our current setup and about what we need going forward. hopefully this information will be enough to determine what kind of setup we need.

currently, we have 9 regional offices. each regional office has one subdomain e.g. pswr.starcafecrm.org and pmr.starcafecrm.org. and each has one Drupal and one CiviCRM database. We run all 9 sites from a single Drupal and CiviCRM codebase.

Each regional office has a number of area offices. Using the pswr rgional as an example:
the pswr region has several area offices: los angeles, hawaii and san diego

ideally, we want the following:
1. all office staff to log into the pswr.starcafecrm.org subdomain
2. if the staff person is the regional (pswr) administrator then he/she should have access to all the contacts/groups
3. if the staff person is in an area office, then he/she should have full access to all the contacts in their group and/or subgroups. if a contact is added at the area office level, then that contact should automatically become part of the group for the area office
4. staff in the area offices should be able to create subgroups
5. if, for example, the hawaii office uses a civi profile link on their website, we would want the information for the contact who fills out the form, to be automatically added to the hawaii group or subgroup
6. we are not using civicrm for event planning but i could see that changing in the near future
7. the icing on the cake would be if we could also segregate contribution data that is entered or imported directly into civicrm. we do not do any online fundraising nor do we intend to. this would only be for contributions that are entered, by staff in an area office, directly into civicrm, so hawaii staff would see only contributions entered by someone in their office

we don't really leverage drupal in any way, at least right now. all we use it for is a front end to civi. and the only user accounts that are stored in the drupal databases belong to staff: we don't have user accounts for our contacts.

i want the simplest approach to this but it has to work in the way i described. we didn't really abandon acl's. it was more that their functionality on 3.1.2 did not allow us to meet our goals. for example: if an area office staff person entered a contact, the contact "disappeared" and the staff person was not able to add the contact to their group because he/she did not have access to the record. it was then that i learned about multi-site/org and, based on conversations with eileen, i thought that we couldn't meet our needs without one or both them. although now it seems that they are, perhaps, one in the same but i am not sure.

i know we need one civicrm databse for each site but i am still not sure whether we need multiple domains and multiple drupals. have i given you enough information for you to help me determine this? Also, if we do need multiple domains could we get around this by doing "directory based" installs of Drupal instead of creating new subdomains? e.g. pswr.starcafecrm.org/LA pswr.starcafecrm.org/HI

thanks peter,
cynthia

Dear Peter,
Our phone conversation was very helpful to me yesterday and I am about to make a plan for moving forward with multi-site.

I have a few  more questions:
1. If we use the Drupal subdomain module, do we have to set up dns records for all the sites (area offices)?
2. What has your experience been with regards to upgrading CiviCRM/Drupal with multi-site configuration?
3. At present, we have 2 sites that already have area office data in them. For example: pswr.starcafecrm.org has data for Los Angeles, San Diego and Hawaii. When we move to the multisite configuration, will there be a way for us to get multi-site to work with the contact groups that are already set up in that site?

Thanks again Peter,
Cynthia