CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hi all,

I have a potential web project I’ve been asked to look into for an organisation I'm working with and I’m currently in the process of researching its technical viability with Drupal + CiviCRM and also any potential costs (if custom code is needed). A lot of what is required (see below) seems viable and possible, however because I’ve never actually used CiviCRM in this way I’m having trouble finding enough information one way or the other to see if it’s actually a) possible, and b) possible for me to achieve.

First, some background on me:
I’m been using Drupal for about 2 years now (Drupal 6 and now getting into D7) and have pretty much learnt it as I go along. Most websites I build are relatively small and simple pages with things like web forms, image galleries, views, feeds, etc. I am versed in HTML/CSS but have had no previous experience with PHP except what I’ve poked around with in Drupal (such as custom theme templates, etc.). This will be my first CiviCRM project.

The project:
The proposed project will involve a small front-facing website that essentially will be like a job registration and information system between a chain of businesses and contractors that visit their premises. The site will have two types of users, businesses and contractors. Each will have their own profiles which can be viewed by either party where they will be able to provide various information about themselves (such as qualifications, insurance information, etc. for contractors; and site regulations, parking instructions, OH&S policies, etc. for the businesses).

The tricky part is that the client wants to be able to use the website to generate registration forms for individual jobs. This needs to pull information from both sets of user profiles to generate job registrations which can be PDF’d. Essentially we need to display on a page contractor information pulled from a particular contractors profile, business information from their profile and then allow that to be PDF’d - We want to create a mini-contract, or registration, for each occurrence of a contractor visiting a business to perform work – including all the legally required information that goes along with that. The client would like contractors to be able to upload PDFs to their profiles that contain their insurance information, OH&S regs, etc. that will need to be displayed as a link on the form that we’re creating – so that the businesses can see an exact link to the related PDF of the contractor should they need to look it up.

Additionally, and this is where my eyes start to glaze over, they would like to have this job registration presented on a page exactly as it would look if printed (probably 2 or 3 pages total) with a text entry area for the contractor to enter in custom information – such as which part of the business they will be working in, whether they’re doing welding or some other safety related work, etc. and then save the whole page, including what they type in the custom text area, as a pdf.

At this stage I’m thinking something like CiviCRM would be good to handle to the two databases and their related profiles (also, there is the potential in the future of the project for paid subscriptions), along with some Drupal modules. The part that I’m stuck on is this registration form and if it’s possible to pull data from two different profiles/databases, place them on the same screen, place links to related PDFs on their as well and also provide some sort of custom text entry area, and then PDF the whole thing so it can be saved as a registration form by the businesses… I imagine it’s possible if it was custom coded, and if that’s the case I’d love to know if anyone has a guess as to how much that’d cost; or if there’s a collection of existing modules that can do what I need…

Sorry this is a bit long, I’ll be monitoring this to answer any questions/etc. and any advice and opinions would be greatly appreciated! I've also posted a similar post to this on the Drupal forums to see what kind of feedback I can get - and I'm all ears! =)

Thanks,
-Chris

I suggest you thoroughly research what the Webform / CiviCRM integration can do since it has some capability of forms for multiple contacts with relationships, and with some css or the other Webform additional modules that can potentially help with form layout you may be able to get a fair way down the track without breaking the bank.