CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hey everyone. Our organization currently uses wordpress for its main public-facing website. I have played around with using CiviCRM with Wordpress but never gotten it fully configured (CiviMAIL was throwing me off). We are getting closer to crunch time as we have just received the go-ahead for Incorporation, so getting a working CRM is going to be important. So I am trying to figure out whether integrating with the wordpress site we are already using is the way to go, or if I should set up an instance of drupal separately to serve solely as the CRM. What are the best practices? After playing some a LOT of the CRM functionality would be of no concern to an average user, so I'm not sure if it's appropriate to include it in the same CMS install as our main public facing website.

One of our original reasons for wanting a CRM was keeping membership information in a single centralized place. Right now we take in contact information, put it in a mailing list hosted at mailchimp, and that's where it stays.

We don't have 99.9% of this information in wordpress. However in the future we'd like to set up membership forms on the wordpress site that will integrate with CiviCRM so any new members are automatically added. If I install CiviCRM in both drupal and wordpress and point them both to the same external database, can we use both?

Agree with Hershel that having two different sites makes it complicated. In the case where I really had to I would use the API to get data to and from CiviCRM in my Wordpress site. But my recommendation would be to fix the Wordpress stuff.....