CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Read about their NGO directory and try it out:
http://www.sangonet.org.za/portal/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=9132&Itemid=1

Hi

Thanks for the feedback and interest in Prodder.  We at SANGONeT have been working with Civicrm for a year or so now. We are part of the Techsoup Global network mentioned here http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,2374.0.html and we did an earlier version of an online directory using Civi 1.4 here http://directory.fhr.org.za/. Prodder is one of the flagship projects at SANGONeT though somewhat underfunded at the moment. This has meant that any functional upgrades haven't been possible using our existing solution (eDirectory.com) since we just didn't have the funds to commission work from them. We decided late last year to port the directory into Civi. We've had to get it done part-time working around actual paying work; and it really is due to the quality of Civi itself that we have been able to do that.  Partly as a result of that we haven't done a lot of significant development, only what was absolutely necessary. A litle about the project so far:

We've  used Drupal as the CMS; we are slowly porting all of our sites to Drupal from Joomla. Most of the new Prodder features that we are working on at the moment will be around civi/drupal integration using civinode and organic group integration.

The front page is a panel with 3 blocks; a quick search  block, '3 random orgs block' and a featured org block. The search block is currently just a hard-code html form. The 3 random orgs uses crm_get_contact to pull contacts limited to a 'live_and_published' group and then randomised. The featured org is done manually since we will be integrating additional  written NGO profiles from our main portal site for the featured org. As we move that portal from Joomla to Drupal, we will be automating that integration.
We'll submit the random contact code snippet in the next week, just want to add some comments etc.
 
The search form is just the main search function rethemed. Depending on the drupal user role, the template is switched out - an appropriately authenticated user sees the usual Civi search form, others see the limited one. Sam Marx, the SANGONeT developer, found working with the main search form template exposed more of the contact's info (especially relationship data) rather than the profile template.

The search listing is based on a profile - this limits the listing to appropriate organisations, and also allows us to add listing fields via the administrator page rather than in code. Again theres some code that checks the user drupal role to determine whether or not to expose the edit  link.  The organisations detail page uses the  main contact view page with a switched template; what you see depends on your role. Again, we started out using profiles but battled with exposing everything we needed to. This is based on Civi 1.7 so things may have changed - it would certainly make life easier to use profiles more.

We also use Prodder as an internal contact directory within the organisation - using CiviCRM out of the box, as it were, as well as an organisational management tool (Drupal CaseTRacker, wikis etc). We're currently getting up to speed on CiviEvent for a large conference we'll be holding in October.

On our to do list: lots of Drupal content and Civi Contact integration using Civinode.  We're very keen on working with Organic Group/Civi group integration (we're using Organic Groups extensively in another project www.citizenjournalismafrica.org) and are excited by the potential for utilising both of them to make use of the Drupal social networking tools.

Comments and queries are welcome; again we really haven't had many resources to put into this so some of our solutions may be inelegant at the moment, but we're very pleased to have a product out that we are going to be able to build on extensively over the coming years.

Matthew de Gale

ICT Services Manager
SANGONeT (Southern African NGO Network)
matthew@sangonet.org.za
skype: mdegale
GTalk: mdegale
www.sangonet.org.za
www.sangotech.org
www.citizenjournalismafrica.org
beta.prodder.org.za