CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Why do you feel you need to create a node for each Contact? You can use Contacts as entities within Drupal:

https://www.drupal.org/project/civicrm_entity

I have to manage product listings, galleries and also help implement search engine optimization on a page-by-page basis.

Why does this require creating a node? I don't follow.

Also, Nodes will be created for Organizations who sometimes may or not be in the CiviCRM system, so I can't rely specifically on CiviCRM to handle the creation of pages.

Is there a reason why you can't just create them in CiviCRM and mark them as being different somehow, like with a tag or some such?

In short I need the Drupal Content Management "part" and the CiviCRM Contact list to play nicely, communicate when they have to, but for the most part stay independent as much as possible. I think adding dependencies early on will limit what I can do in both Drupal and CiviCRM. Maybe I am wrong though... and this is the exact module I am looking for.

The reason I encourage you not to duplicate data is because it's generally not advisable. You need not just a way to create a node for each new contact but also a way to maintain deleted nodes/contacts or edited nodes/contacts so that your two databases remain linked correctly always.

Regarding your initial issues of product listings, galleries and SEO, you might be better off doing this other ways, like with a custom module. It all depends on your precise needs which are not yet clear.

The objective, which may be a long-shot, is to help 250+ merchants start publishing content on a Drupal Panopoly distribution package.

Creating the single-node is the just the beginning...

The Agricultural Institute of Marin manages 7 of the larger Farmers Markets in the Bay Area and I'm the CiviCRM/Drupal volunteer helping them develop a scalable content publishing platform for Farmers, Ranchers, Fisheries and Food Purveyors to better communicate with the people who buy/sell/consume the produce, meat and dairy.

It's a mixture of the Media module and Inline Entity references in a single content type "Merchant". I chose this route, so new users would not be overwhelmed by Drupal, but would also still be able to effectively manage a video gallery, product listings, additional retail locations, and other important information from a single node.

Merchant will be provided the ability to edit the Node via SimpleNodeAccess.

1 URL. 1 Edit Privilege. 1 User. 1 Save.

I want to make it also super accessible by phone, so recording a video, publishing it to YouTube and adding it to the website should only 15-20 take minutes max. It was hard enough to structure a flexible system, while still letting the very average user still participate in the content creation process.

TLDR: I need to introduce Organization Contacts to the idea of publishing and maintaining content.

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Also, I am using the Finder module to provide ajax search for merchants and products, so I didn't even want to begin and try and get that working with CiviCRM...