CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I am the president of an antique car club of about 3,000 members world wide.  I have experimented with CiviCRM and feel it will really meet our need for an online membership site, but there is one big issue we have.   All the data about our cars and trucks are very important to us.  I tried looking into the custom fields but we really need a solution that allows the vehicle record to be an entity that stands on its own.  I need to be able to set up relationships between the cars and their owners and when one is sold, I want to be able to change that relationship, without entering it all in a new custom field.  I also want to maintain history of "owners" as the car passes from one member to another or comes back in the club.

A vehicle can be "owned" by an individual(s) or an organization.  A vehicle can also be part of a household (what we call Registry - grouping by years, engine type, etc..) that have the same type of characteristics.

Like I said above, custom fields don't work for me because if the individual goes away, so does the vehicle information.

I have contemplated sponsoring this as an add to CiviCRM so that it would benefit all.  I would imagine that this could be beneficial for car, tractor, or other type of vehicle clubs.

Any thoughts on the best way to approach this?

Thanks for the suggestion.  We are currently having issues getting CiviCRM to come up in our test sub-domain, but as soon as we get that fixed I will try your suggested solution.  We will certainly contribute.  I just need to get this up and running before I take a contribution motion to the board.  If we are using it as our membership database, we will look to support improvements that make functionality that we need better.

Presumably you'll need to be able to identify every vehicle in your database uniquely, so it would make sense to use this unique identifier as the name, and kill two birds with one stone. I'm in the UK, and here every vehicle on the road has unique licence plate (we cal it the registration number). Id on't know what it's like where you but I imagine there must be a unique identifier for each vehicle.

In terms of collecting information from your members when signing up, assuming you are using Drupal as your CMS, perhaps the webform_civicrm module is your friend here?