CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hello,

I would like to use CiviCRM as a staff directory for my Drupal site. I have a few questions, though. First, does this seem like a good idea? I realize it may be a bit of overkill to start, but we would eventually like to expand to event registration and other contact tracking (with emails, etc.). So, it seems best to start with CiviCRM and expand when necessary, rather than convert over to CiviCRM at a later date.

Second, my technical requirements are a bit odd - my Drupal installation uses a custom template engine based on Smarty 3. Unfortunately, it conflicts with CiviCRM's older Smarty installation. Therefore, I must run the CiviCRM portion as a separate site to avoid the problem. Can I still query the CiviCRM data from my main site if I don't have any CiviCRM modules enabled on that main site? Essentially, how would I go about send a search query for a contact to the CiviCRM database from my main site and display the results? Views?

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.

Jim

Thanks... is the Views2 integration separate from the CiviCRM module (i.e., can I use it on the main site without enabling CiviCRM)? Is there any documentation?

Thanks... I'll search and see what info I can find. However, there will be a problem with the user profile pages, as CiviCRM adds info to those pages causing the template engine conflict (which is how I first identified it).

Thanks for the link. And, good point concerning event registration... we're going to move forward by downgrading our Smarty to 2.6.26 to avoid the conflict for now.