CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

The difference between what can be done with Tags vs. Groups and Groups vs. Smart Groups came up in a few sessions at CiviCon.  I've always told clients not to worry too much about whether they use a tag or a group, because it's easy to select all the contacts with a tag and add them to a group.  I started to wonder why there isn't a way to automatically synchronize smart groups with a 'static' group on cron.  I understand the performance issues with allowing some functions to use smart groups, but this would almost be like caching the Smart Group results in a Group.  There have been several times I could have used an extension like Smart Group Sync and it doesn't seem too difficult to write.  All we'd need is a UI that lists all smart groups, allows the user to pair the smart group with a group, and a setting for how often the user wants the synchronization to run.  I can't imagine this would take more than 5 or 6 hours to write as a Drupal module, but I think it would be better as an extension so it could be useful to Joomla and WordPress sites too.

Is there already an extension, module, plugin that does this?

If not, does anyone who's more familiar with CiviCRM Extensions want to work with me on this?

I agree that sync'ing from groups (esp smart groups) is a ripe topic for an extension.

It feels a little awkward to do an internal sync -- e.g. from a CiviCRM smart group to a CiviCRM static group. This would produce two groups that would appear in several UIs -- for example, when sending a mailing, a user would see both the smart and static group. Is there an example use-case for that?

For me, the first use-case around "smart group sync" that comes to mind stems from Nicolas' presentation on email marketing tools -- e.g. mail blasting a group through Constant Contact or MailChimp. It's simple to sync a static group to an external service but harder to sync a smart group -- and an extension could simplify that. If the extension were framed as a "Group Sync API" or "Group Sync Service", then it would help the mail-blast use-case (without the side-effects of creating an extra group inside Civi).