CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Joe - it may not be necessary to move away from drupal entities at all.  There is work by Eileen and others to have civicrm work as a bona-fide entity in drupal.  This would allow us to use many drupal modules that operate on civicrm fields.  Obviously this is hypothetical since the civicrm-entity work is still in progress, but it seems to me on the surface that we may have much more bang for the buck if we could get the entity thing nailed and let the drupal-mailchimp module (or other drupal mail integration modules) manage the mail process logic but rather than work on drupal profile entities and groups, it can work on civicrm groups and update unsubscribes, sync lists, etc. I realize that this is a very different approach than we have traditionally taken, but it would open the door to far more integration with drupal modules and dramatically reduce the duplication of effort.  Furthermore, we could benefit from the contribution of the much larger drupal audience. 

I am aware of several projects that are working on this.  See this thread for more details:
http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,27227.0.html

and some discussion on github:
https://github.com/eileenmcnaughton/civicrm_entity/issues/1
https://github.com/bangpound/civicrmentity

There has already been some work done using the views-entity / token integration (http://drupal.org/node/1253612) but I have not tried it.  Clearly this is not yet a complete solution (bounce processing, etc.) and there is definitely interest - http://drupal.org/node/1890840.  Note that there is very strong support for drupal entities (caching, remote services, etc.)

The technical architecture is beyond me, but intuitively I'm convinced that this type of integration can transform druapl-civicrm architecture and open it up to a the broader drupal community.  RedHen has had a lot of success by integrating as a drupal entity and making it much easier to work with in new distributions (OpenOutreach, Drupal Commerce, etc.)  We could avoid many of the drupal-integration band-aids in views, calendar, etc. and take advantage of all the drupal displays like DisplaySuite, Panels Fields, etc.

Perhaps we can make 2 MIHs, one for Entities and another for extending Drupal-Mailchimp.!

make it happen info for 4.4 is here;

http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRM/Make+it+Happen
http://civicrm.org/blogs/michael-mcandrew/make-it-happen-44-submit-your-campaigns-now

lobo

I don't see MailChimp on that list. Where can we contribute to it?

Sonicthoughts: great summary you have made here and on the MIH page about the entities projects. I have just tested the civicrm_entity project by Eileen and it works really great with views+vbo+rules for my needs.

How do we proceed from here? I am not a developer myself, more a web project manager and system manager. I know how to edit basic php and write some basic Civi API functions, but I am definately not a hardcore developer. It's not my professional job either - just volunteering in some non-profit organizations so funding from my site will unfortunately also be very limited.

But I really wish to see this happen. Having CiviCRM as the CRM core and using more of Drupal functionality as frontend for instance for member administration will be a very strong combination. I have also taken a look on Redhen, but I miss a lot of the basic CiviCRM core functionality, but they have the benefit of using Drupal entities.

This thread was initally about the CiviCRM MailChimp integration and it's not my intention to highjack the thread for discussing about the entities project. So how do we proceed from here regarding entities? As far as I can see there is no MIH candidate for this.

Is it possible to make a funding page like for the MIH projects? I know it is too late for making this a MIH project, but if there was a funding page, we could ask people that are interested in a continuous and much more improved Drupal integration to donate.

I would like to donate as well, eventhough it would not be much as a private person, but the more people donating the better. Pete mentioned in the vbo thread that they will try and take a look at it next week.

Thanks a lot for the info, Lobo! I will discuss it with Pete and Shawn.

/Morten

Saw that  http://civicrm.org/extensions/mailchimp-sync just popped up in the extensions directory.  Can anyone share their experiences with this extension?

I've had several organizations request this integration in the past few weeks, and I'm excited to try this out!

At a glance from my phone (traveling at the moment) it looked like fresh code.  I agree with everyone that TI's integration seemed more like an alpha, but I'll post my experience with this extension once it's implemented it next week.

Don't mean to derail the CiviCRM/Drupal entities discussion -- that's very exciting too!