CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hi

I'm pretty new to CiviCRM, but have been using Drupal for 3 or 4 years now. I'm building a site for a non-profit association that will include a register of individual contacts, and hold a range of data about those contacts, enabling them to maintain and add to the data. I think CiviCRM can do the job, but would welcome opinions from more experienced users, based on the following:

Each contact will need to add information about their employing organisation (can I enable contacts to add organisation contacts related to themselves?). As their employer might change over time, I'd like to be able to build up a career history for each contact. Can I do this?

The contacts will also be required to maintain a history of the training events they participate in. Again the contact will be adding new training events as they are completed, building up a history of the training they have undertaken. Not sure how to do this - perhaps using an activity? - can I enable a contact to create a specific activity for themselves?

The rest of the data held seems fairly straightforward, but as the above involve multiple records per contact I can't see any way - having read the documentation - of enabling multiple records per contact other than through the built in options (activities, org contacts, etc.) Maybe I'm missing something?

Any input would most welcome.

Thanks
Graham

Hi Upperholme,

I also think CiviCRM will be the best foundation for your project. This year I worked on a custom Drupal module that allows users to create records (Drupal nodes) about contract jobs they've worked on, with a field to associate the node with their currently employer. (Administrators can also create job nodes on behalf of the employer.) If the user changes changes employers, they no longer have access to manipulate the job node, but the record of their participation still shows in a custom tab for both the employer & the employee. It also supports multiple employers per user. CiviCRM's automatic relationship history suits this well. (An employee relationship can be active or not, and current or "expired", providing precise designation of an employees status). In this case, the Drupal module interacts with CiviCRM entirely by API - no direct database manipulation required.

So technologically speaking, you'll have the tools you need with CiviCRM and its API.

In my opinion, these are the questions you need to ask: What data is best stored as a drupal node? (possibly none) What's best as a CiviCRM record? What's best as a "light database object" or something else. How are permissions to add/edit/delete a record determined? (By virtue of relationship? By simple Drupal role-based Permissioning? By CiviCRM ACLs?)

Hope that helps.

All the Best,

Matt

What exactly do you see as the shortcoming?

As I've noted, CiviCRM has everything you need. Multiple, date-based Relationships allow for tracking 'employment histories', and the robust API allows you to associate contacts with Drupal nodes, if you need some other kind of record besides the included Individuals, Organmizations, Events, Relationships, etc, etc...

My company provides Drupal+CiviCRm services. You can view our portfolio at:

http://www.NinjitsuHosting.com/portfolio

All the Best,

Matt