CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

We're considering CiviCRM and are new to CRMs in general.  One aspect in consideration is the benefit of CMS integration.  We're most experienced with Wordpress and Expression Engine.  We have a demo of CiviCMS loaded on Drupal and see that Drupal is nice.  However, since our current developers are most experienced with Expression Engine/Wordpress, we'd prefer to stay with one of those.

Q:  Is there much power/functionality/flexibility lost if using the Wordpress/CiviCRM integration vs the Drupal/CiviCRM integration.  i.e. what features are lost by moving to a Wordpress/CiviCRM integration vs the Drupal one?

My 2p:
As a developer, learning Drupal after Wordpress is pretty easy. It's extremely well documented, and PHP is PHP.
I'd say the long-term benefits are worth the short-term time investment.

I appreciate the input.

Does the above mean that, in WordPress, we won't be able to use the CiviCRM features like having members update their addresses, renew their memberships, register for conferences???

All core civicrm features work in all CMSs. So all the above are possible in Wordpress. The issue is just that CiviCRM has been extended quite a bit more in Drupal particularly with Views and Webforms. Many people find those extensions useful, and some (like me) find them indispensable.
But if you find yourself completely happy with what Civi does "out of the box" and do not forsee any need for custom features, then it doesn't matter which CMS you go with.

Views and webform are both highly abstracted and can be used for almost any purpose. In general, Views is used for getting your data out and Webform for getting it in. If you tell me what your organization does, maybe I can think of examples that would be meaningful to you.

We are a membership organization with about 1000 members and we use CiviCRM to keep track of our memberships. We are working on a new website where we will want to have a page where members can renew their memberships and also update their contact information such as address, phone, etc. without having to email that info to us for US to make the updates. We will also want to run a "Members Only" portion of the website which will only be available for current members and which access will automatically stop when/if their membership lapses.

Tina

Everything you mention can be done in WordPress except for a "Members Only" portion of the website, which may be possible, but I myself don't know if it is or not6.

In Drupal it's certainly possible to do that.

WordPress can handle a Members only section, though depending on the type of restriction you want, it may require some additional considerations.  For instance, a role manager plugin will allow you to easily create multiple different user categories and then template controls like is_usercategory can be set to display different content depending on the user type.

It's not that hard once you get used to how it works, but some of the WP core functions don't play nice with that kind of restriction, so you have to route around them.