CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I just found this topic, and I think this is a great topic to keep going and keep track of, for the Civi developers.  This can be a great template for how to continue improving Civi in a way that it wins favor with a greater number of CRM users.  Would be interesting to find out what others now think of Civi's perceived scariness, years since this post was started.  I for one must agree with the sentiment that Civi upgrages are scary.

In the most recent upgrade (which was quite traumatic for me and ate up a month when I should have been doing other critical tasks) I wanted a tech support service I could call or chat or send an email and get a fast reply.  Would have been worth it to me to pay.  The forum was sometimes helpful, but other times not.  I was over my head.  I can say that Hershel (of civihosting.com) was very helpful multiple times and I'm grateful.

One solution here could be a hosted service that would take care of upgrades and other complicated stuff.  That might well make sense, but those I found were priced beyond our ability to manage (we're a pretty small one person organization besides the board).

Part of the problem is we made a choice to Joomla and there is less expertise and resources for civiCRM and Joomla.

I can say that, other than installation, civiCRM is way improved from the days of that original post and apart from installation, it is not scary at all and in fact it is a joy to use and I'm thankful for it everytime I do use it.

Christopher

Great responses Denver Dave and conductorchris

We provide managed CiviCRM platforms for clients on Drupal, and having a staging platform for upgrades is very helpful, but it does have cost implications.

One of the issues we run into that can make upgrades 'scarier' is having CiviCRM integrated within the CMS.  There's a lot of reasons for this such as modules having different levels of compatibility with a given core CMS (e.g. Joomla 1.x/2.x/3.x or Drupal 6.x/7.x) or because there is a whole heap of customisation done to the website that impacts on the way the core CRM operates so that upgrades to the CRM impact on those customisations.

Moving from Joomla to Drupal has addressed some of these issues, because Drupal has tools and methods for developing modules that ease the upgrade pain, but for medium-larger clients we often recommend installing CiviCRM on a Drupal platform separate from their website and using the CiviCRM REST API to integrate the website with the CRM (a more expensive option) or having the website link to the CiviCRM platform for event registrations, donations etc (more cost effective but not as seamless).  That way the people doing 'website stuff' can focus on the creative/communications pieces without worrying about breaking the CRM and, as long as the relevant API doesn't change, upgrades of the CRM can be done without as much risk of breaking the 'website stuff'.

Andrew