CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Originally, I posted this at http://groups.drupal.org/node/9629, but am now moving the discussion here to connect with more CiviCRM people.

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Does anyone have (or know of) experience integrating CiviCRM into a school portal (website), such that students and parents can self-manage their contact information for use by the school and/or school PTO?

Today in Newton Public Schools (http://www.newton.k12.ma.us), we have 21 different school sites, with none of them sharing any user login or contact information between them.  My vision is to integrate the 21 sites into a single instance of CiviCRM, so they can share user login and contact information across them.

Even there is not direct experience with this, is there anyone interested in scoping out such an implementation and maybe even working together to pilot test something like this?

Next step might be to define use cases for how this integration would be used.

I do agree with Bill and the need for a couple of use cases to begin with. Its a bit hard to talk about it without knowing the required/desired features/functionality.

Bill: The modules we'd use would depend on the functionality required . Currently I dont think any user activity gets exposed / stored in the CiviCRM database (i.e. if the users blog/comments/posts on the forum we dont record it). Making this happen is probably quite easy right now either by using hooks or triggers in Drupal v6. We have a mechanism to store this data (activities and link it back to the relevant "user activity"). I'm kinda surprised that no one has implemented this as yet

lobo

Hi,

I agree that this seems like the sort of thing that civiCRM would be good for. Do you have permissions issues? i.e. who will be able to see whose details? Will you hit any privacy issues?

Setting up a system for children is not an easy task because of all the rules that apply to children in terms of not using photos without parental consent and not using full names in any situation that might be public.

You also have to take into consideration that parents should be able to see their child's information but not the information of other children. So the idea of different levels doesn't work cleanly here. I see this as more of a relationship model of if x is member of class y or if x is parent of student y, then apply the following permissions. I don't know civiCRM well enough to know if this is viable, but that's how I would deal with it.

Thane

Here is a quick draft use-case:

Users:

-Site adminsitrators

-Parents

-Taxpayers (people who pay taxes but do not have students in school)

Site Administrators:

- Monitor site content according rules/guidlines

- Assist users with technical issues.

Site admin responsibilities enabled by Drupal's built in core tools, possible add-on modules (to be detailed in new draft)

Parents use the site to:

-Share date/knowledge information (enabled via Organic groups, wikitools, custom content types, userlinks, and taxonomy)

-Organize events (presumably enabled via CiviEvent)

-Organize letter-writing/email writing/calling, or other political action campaigns (enabled possibly by Signit module, CiviMail, other ?? still researching, suggestions appreciated, will be rolled into future drafts of this document and shared)

- Collect donation moneys (presumably enabled by CiviContribute)

- Participate in collective decision making about group activities (probably enabled via Advanced Polling)



Taxpayers use the site to:


-Share date/knowledge information (enabled via Organic groups, wikitools, userlinks, custom content types and taxonomy)

-Organize events (presumably enabled via CiviEvent)

-Organize letter-writing/email writing/calling, or other political action campaigns (enabled possibly by Signit module, CiviMail, other ?? still researching, suggestions appreciated, will be rolled into future drafts of this document and shared)


Open questions (some of which will be answered upon testing CiviCRM with Drupal)

* How will Drupal's Built in profile system work with the personal data collected via CiviCRM? (it's possible we might use Advanced Profile, with Panels/Views, too)

I am also posting this document to http://groups.drupal.org/node/10643 wiki page on groups.drupal.org.