CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I hope you'll all forgive me for posting such a noobish question. I've searched and scoured (this forum, the wiki and the web) and still haven't found a straight forward answer to my question, so I hope some here has the time to lend an ear (or any eye as the case is

I am in the planning stages of building a site that is for a new membership based organization. The site needs a registration page, where people give personal info (phone, address, employer etc), create a new user and password, and pay with a credit card.

After that they should automatically receive an email welcoming them to the organization and are subscribed to our members-only newsletter. (Using CiviCRM Mail) They must also be able to use their login to visit a members only section of the site.

Registered members also need to be able to sign up for classes that we will offer. For this they will fill out another form, (using CiviCRM Contribute), where they pay money, and their account will be flagged as enrolled, (using CiviCRM custom fields).

My primary question is this:

Is this something I can setup using CiviCRM 1.9 and Joomla 1.5, with out any custom module building, hacking etc. Can I just install it, and configure all this through the Admin?

Secondarily:

How tightly do CiviCRM 1.9 accounts, groups and permissions integrate with Joomla 1.5?

Would this be easier to do with Drupal 5.x that Joomla 1.5?


Any and all feed back is very welcome and I am so very grateful for it. Links to other relevant forums posts, wiki articles and the like are adored.

Thanks so much, Regards
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matthew