CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hi

I am very excited about having found CiviCRM. I am responsible for communications and IT for Nightline, the confidential student support charity. We are the umbrella group for the forty Nightlines in the UK. We and each university helpline are run entirely by volunteers. Our budgets are just tens or hundreds of pounds a year.

For years I have been looking for a free, open source, web based CRM system that could cope with the concept of contacts as members. What I've really wanted though is to integrate that with extranet authentication, community and groupware tools and a CMS. Single sign on and no duplicate data are vital.
Finally it feels that with CiviCRM + Mambo/Joomla/Drupal I might have found it!

Mambo/Joomla, Drupal were on my list of potential systems along with: XRMS, dotProject, More.groupware, eGroupware, NetProject, AbsolutelyBusy, Progress, TikiWiki/Bitweaver. None of them quite cut it though. I was becoming resigned to spending months developing our own bespoke system. So having seen the demo of CiviCRM I feel I've died and gone to heaven!

I do have a few questions:

1) What is the current situation regarding Joomla/Mambo/Drupal integration?:
Do you recommend either Joomla or Mambo?
Do you recommend either of those or Drupal?

I looked at the demos and found my way straight in on the Drupal version. I couldn't work it out on the Joomla version.

2) We currently use phpbb. I would like to keep this or at the very least migrate all the posts and users to a new system. That seems to give me preference for Joomla or Mambo. Does anyone have any thoughts on this in terms of CiviCRM?

3) I have had a peak at 'Creating a Drupal user for every CiviCRM contact' and 'Complex permissioning for organizations with local groups'.
Is there an advice for doing this stuff with Joomla/Mambo?

As I mentioned I want to use this for logins to our extranet. However most but not all the contacts should have access. Also how does the contact find out about their account and the login details for it?

4) I realise this is very cheeky to ask here, but given it took me so long to find CiviCRM I have to ask. Are there any other similar systems I should look at?

Thanks very much
James

1) What is the current situation regarding Joomla/Mambo/Drupal integration?:
Do you recommend either Joomla or Mambo?
Do you recommend either of those or Drupal?

It depends on you needs, do you know . Both integrations have their strengths and weaknesses. Drupal allows better integration with you authentication systems... signing people up, collecting registration information, etc.

2) We currently use phpbb. I would like to keep this or at the very least migrate all the posts and users to a new system. That seems to give me preference for Joomla or Mambo. Does anyone have any thoughts on this in terms of CiviCRM?

The Drupal community has plenty of people using phpbb.
In fact there is an actively maintained phpbb integration module for Drupal (http://drupal.org/project/phpbb)

As I mentioned I want to use this for logins to our extranet. However most but not all the contacts should have access. Also how does the contact find out about their account and the login details for it?

This is one of the needs that would steer you toward Drupal. Users can register themselves with Drupal, be automatically connected to their CiviCRM record and phpbb record based on the email address, then you control access based on Drupal access control.

Are there any other similar systems I should look at?

Nothing in the open source world with a comparable feature set is designed for the needs of NGOs and Civic organizations.

James:

1. You might want to read up on drupal roles and permissions on the drupal web site and get a better idea of how permissioning is handled there. Note that CiviCRM is currently in transition with regard to permissioning and it is split between Drupal and within CiviCRM

2. Synchronizing your drupal and civicrm db is a one-off process only. Once you have done that, every Drupal user will be a CiviCRM contact. The reverse is not true. You can have contacts in the system that are not Drupal users.

3. A Drupal user logging in has all the permissions available to him/her based on their roles. So you might have to tweak the "registration" process to grant a user the appropriate roles when the user is created. You might want to check the logintobaggan module for this on drupal

lobo

Dan:

In profile settings, you can set the group that all members who sign up are assigned into. However this group is static and all members will be assigned to that group (different from what you want)

to make the group assignment dynamic, u'll have to modify the code and / or implement a drupal user hook that is invoked after the civicrm user hook

lobo

Not enough Joomla! community members around these parts.  I thought I'd speak up.

http://www.google.com/trends?q=Joomla%2C+Drupal

*cough..*cough..

 

..and ya Joomla! does all that too.

Lets avoid getting into a Joomla/Drupal discussion here.

Isn't that what James wanted to know?

Anyway, a more helpful reply than my first 

1. Joomla! - Bigger overall community than Drupal, it's about 50-50 in downloads of CiviCRM, but it seems like the 'active' community of CiviCRM tends to lean Drupal.

2. Forum - You can use phpBB in Joomla!, but SMF is more widely used it seems, and SMF offers a converter..so switching is no problem.  The bridges allow you to match the group in the forum to a Joomla ACL level too..so you won't have to redo users access levels. 

3. Member Area - Joomla! ACL allows for 3 levels.  Guest. Registered. Special. If you need more than that or have very specific individual ACL needs there is an extension to add full ACL control, but it's a hack and can be a pain in the bum depending on everything else you install.

4. Not sure.

Double check http://extensions.joomla.org/ for anything you might want to use.