CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I do think Civi needs more social networking integration (example: being able to autopost events on a facebook / twitter page). However we should also be careful and avoid re-inventing the wheel. Might help if you can elaborate a lot more on what your org would potentially find with regard to a social networking component

lobo

Hello All,


My proposal:

• Start with a Wall type concept first.  Users would be allowed to post messages and links.  Linking and auto-embeding Youtube videos would be a must i would think.
• Custom profiles can manage the required additional information based on each organization's specific needs.
• Each user would be allowed to group contacts and added show/hide permissions to each group to limit visibility of their posts.
• A profile image system would be required for "avatars".
• This of course would need to work in both Joomla and Drupal CMS's.

These are just some of my thoughts.  The reason for our site to have it's own community/social network is that we have a large number of older/distrustful members.  So asking them to join Facebook or Google+ is not an option.  Our site offers and promises a certain level of privacy and security that is very attractive to our older members.

We'd be interested in following this effort and perhaps adding some of our thoughts and experiences to the idea generation. Our company completed a major integration of Joomla! JomSocial with CiviCRM/CiviEvents in late August 2011. Much of the CiviEvents functionality has been brought to the frontend of Joomla and blended into JomSocial.  The site is a Volunteer Community run by Activate Good, a nonprofit located in Raleigh, NC with a mission to help connect volunteers with other nonprofits in our area.

There's some information about the extent of the integration work in the announcements area of our forums, and a video with a few screen shots and a bit of information about the site on our homepage.

Here's what we did:

Allow authorized JomSocial profile types to:
•Create, Edit, Copy or Cancel CiviEvents on the Joomla frontend
•Private Message CiviEvent participants using JomSocial directly from a custom CiviEvent component on the frontend
•Approve participants who request to attend any CiviEvents they own
•Approve or update volunteering hours for each participant after the CiviEvent is complete

We also built:
•Joomla component "Manage CiviEvents", accessible only to authorized JomSocial profiles
•Joomla component "Manage Participant Hours" to track volunteer hours
•CiviCRM Contacts integration with JomSocial profile types (JSPT)
•Integration of third party JomSocial extensions Admin Approval and Welcome Emails with the CiviCRM profile add forms
•Customized all of the CiviEvent emails
•New CiviEvent email templates for specific system events in CiviCRM workflows
•Display any CiviEvents a user owns on their JomSocial profile
•Display the latest CiviEvents a JomSocial user has been a participant in
•Extreme customization of CiviEvent information pages on the frontend
•Customized CiviEVent RSVP process
•Custom JomSocial menu module which can show the JS menu on any page. This allowed us to give a more cohesive user interface between CiviCRM pages, MyBlog pages and custom component views

Plus even more customizations, like a dynamic search for CiviEvents on the frontend, with links to JomSocial profiles and the CiviEvent all on the results pages.

Obviously this is a very complex integration of Joomla, JomSocial and CiviCRM. We're considering which Joomla! 1.5 plugins, modules and components we developed might be able to be modified to be generic enough to be viable as stand alone extensions.  I'd love to hear people's thoughts on what might be of greatest interest to the CiviCRM community out of the above list.