Author Topic: CiviCRM or from scratch? (Read 5136 times)

ABBiek · April 23, 2007, 11:42:06 am

Hey guys...

I have a project that I'm wondering if CiviCRM would work for...

Admittedly, it's not a civic organization, so some of the CiviCRM features are not optimized for this, but it seems like it may still be better than building the whole thing from scratch. Please advise.

What I'm trying to do is build a music community where groups can sign themselves up (essentially as an "organization" in CiviCRM) and offer a 'fan club' for a set membership fee. The 'fan club' subscription would then be tied to permission-controlled RSS feeds so that the artists could provide content (e.g. recordings) to their fans in exchange for the membership dues. The dues could then either be routed to separate PayPal accounts (one per artist), or alternately, for the sake of reducing our collective costs, they could be routed to a SINGLE account and split up accordingly by us at a later time (that is, we could manually cut each group separate checks). Also, with CiviEvent, it occurred to me that groups might even be able to include sign-up for small gigs so members could reserve their space and whatnot. Anyway, I tried fiddling around with it myself, but I'm simply not adept enough to do all of this on my own. Is this something I could pay someone to do with CiviCRM, or would it be simpler if I just paid someone to code the whole thing from scratch?

Please Advise. Thanks in advance for the help.

geilhufe · April 23, 2007, 05:07:17 pm

CivicSpace has been running into this use case a fair amount. I think it is a pretty good fit for CiviCRM becuase there are so many folks in the community with similar needs.

Quote

What I'm trying to do is build a music community where groups can sign themselves up (essentially as an "organization" in CiviCRM) and offer a 'fan club' for a set membership fee.

This is done pretty well with Organic Groups in Drupal and would make the fan club a lot more than a couple RSS feeds. Issues that would need to be resolved: (1) How can you create a CiviCRM organization member and an organic group all at the same time?

Overall, my guess is that the most cost effective approach would either be a from scratch or built from Drupal solution. Most of the integrations required with CiviCRM would have to be coded from scratch, whereas most of the code to charge for organic group memberships in Drupal is already written.

That said, I think that the Drupal CiviCRM integrations to make this happen would get used by a bunch of people.

ABBiek · April 24, 2007, 08:02:05 am

Thanks for the reply David. I think you may be right about the OG path being a little easier, but when I used OG to begin with, I ran into the problem of it being HORRIFICALLY slow. Of course, I'm on shared hosting, so there's no question that that makes some difference. Anyway, I think the idea is killer, which is probably why so many people are interested.

Does anyone know someone who might be able to code all of this for me? I'm not opposed to it being done via existing Open Source stuff like OG, but I would like it to be fairly robust if I'm going to shell out real money to have it done. I got one quote from a local web-tech company to have it done from scratch in PHP, but they wanted 15-20k which is about 10 times (or at least 3-4 times) what I thought was reasonable.

I have a bid request open on Rent-A-Coder, so we'll see what that turns up. Any other suggestions?

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Author Topic: CiviCRM or from scratch? (Read 5136 times)

ABBiek

CiviCRM or from scratch?

geilhufe

Re: CiviCRM or from scratch?

ABBiek

Re: CiviCRM or from scratch?