CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hi

I am preparing to set up CiviCRM. I prefer to have one DB for the web, one DB for the CRM, mainly for security reasons. The web DB has a different lifecycle, a different maintainance model, etc. A drupal web installation may have all sorts of funny modules installed that I dont want on my CRM installation. So, not only two DB's, but really two different drupal installs. Does that make sense ?

I've think it can be done. But what are the pros and cons ?  I read the Civicrm 'member' can sync with a drupal 'user', but how about organisations or events (if you use civievent and I have custom classes defined for organisations and events on the web side) ? How could these be kept in sync ? Is there a 'best practice' ?

In the end, I foresee telling my client 'not to click the edit button' on either one of the two sides, either the web db or the crm db :-D Is there a way to avoid that ?

*-pike

Hi Davem

Thanks for your answer. I saw the installation guides and realize having separate DB's is done more often. How does that help improving security, if Drupal has access to the CiviCRM db anyway ?

I would rather have a completely separate installation of Drupal and CiviCRM, I think. I probably need to say 'two different drupal installations', one running a website, one running a crm. But then, there is a synchronisation issue.

and doesn't affect any syncing with members, events or anything else

So what if I *want* to sync members, events etc ? I've seen civicrm members can be synced to drupal users. How about other classes ?

do you mean giving them some kind of access to the databases through a gui like phpmyadmin

No. But they will have access to the drupal CMS admin and to CiviCRM. Both will partly be allowed to edit the same content ?

still curious,
*-pike