CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

In Drupal, we would recommend you look at views and see if you can reach your goals using its feature set (its pretty powerful and has got a lot more features than profiles)

Profiles are your best bet to exposing information about said contacts. It does have its limitations as you've encountered

You will need to create your own links / menu types to expose some civicrm urls to your end user. The granularity of the information you can expose is pretty limited (its basically u can see a contact or not, and then you can see component information or not)

If what you want to expose is quite limited / focussed, an easier way might be to write a joomla component / plugin and use the civicrm api to get the data u need

lobo

bickingd,
I am working with joomla as well and need a component/plugin or whatever to have users manage their own events. I am happy to contribute towards the costs of such a project to make it available to the general community.
Others on the forum are looking for similar solutions.
Michael

Thanks for the replies.  I'm looking into these suggestions, and they're leading me to all kinds of new questions.  If I have to go down the path of a full blown customization, then I will have to spend quite a bit of time immersing myself.  Unfortunately, I need to produce something relatively quickly, so I'm in a bit of a bind.

Eileen, the xml menu hook as you describe it looks like a way to make CiviCRM menu items directly available to a user logged into the web site (not the admin section).   Am I getting that right?

Donald,  If I understand you correctly, you are saying that I can define my own "menu item type" using a URL I define myself.  This URL would be for one of the features in CiviCRM I want to access, correct?  Right now, I am limited to the options that appear in the "select a menu type" pop up.  I'm guessing I can add to that list somehow - something to research.

Xavier, your sample is total gibberish to me.  Sorry.  Additionally, any solution I get will have to work with Joomla, and I am not in a position to produce any useful patches at this time, though someday I will be able to do so.

I'm back with some more information. 

Donald, shortly after my prior post, I explored some of the standard menu types in Joomla!, and found that "external link" permits me to set my own URL.  I managed to use it to access a custom search.  This appears to avoid security settings for the user, though, as the results permit me to view and edit all the contact information.

Xavier, I see now what you mean by "smarty template", as I explored the custom search source and see that it uses them.  The view and edit pages I mentioned to Donald above are smarty templates.  I grok that I can make my own to show results that are more restricted, but I don't have the technical knowledge yet to actually do that.  Can you point me at some documentation to help me along - API, examples, etc.?

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David