CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hi folks. I've been playing with CiviCRM in a sandbox, and am about ready to pull the trigger and install it and start migrating my organization, but I haven't decided whether to add Civi to our existing public site, or if I should run a separate Drupal install just for CiviCRM. Has anybody else wrestled with this decision? What are your pro's and con's?

Some background: Our public Drupal site is, at present, primarily informational content only -- visitors don't log in, and interaction is done through FB, Twitter & Disqus, so I don't foresee us having a really strong need for people to log in to our public site EXCEPT for the CiviCRM specific uses: mail subscriptions, donations, advocacy actions, etc.

Advantages of separate installs

• My public Drupal site can use a different version of Drupal than CiviCRM supports. So I could upgrade to Drupal 7 sooner, for instance.
• Better performance, maybe? It seems like Civi slows down Drupal a bit, although I haven't dug very deep.
• Simpler administrative experience for users on both sites

Advantages of combined install

• Integration of CiviCRM and public site users, should we decide to do anything with that later.
• Only one site to maintain / upgrade

Anything else? Does anybody think this is a no-brainer one way or the other? (It's possible that my keep-them-separate tendency is just fear of Civi, which I'm inexperienced with, crippling my Drupal site, which I'm very proud of).

Thanks all!