CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Greetings from Port Vila, Vanuatu.

I'm evaluating CiviCRM for a Pacific-region non-profit arts association for whom I am currently developing a bilingual French/English site. The site uses Wordpress for content management, as the administrators of the site don't like Joomla - they find the way it categorises information illogical and say that it is too complex for non-technical people like themselves. (I agree with them to a certain extent, though of course all CMSes have similar faults). I haven't experimented with Drupal and don't plan to due to time constraints.

I am looking at CiviCRM because it seems to meet all of their requirements for a constituent/membership management system out-of-the-box (I have also looked at salesforce, sugarCRM, various WP plugins and will look at Amember and Boonex Dolphin next).

What I am envisioning is a site that uses Wordpress to manage dynamic news and constituent-made content (i.e. content made by and/or specific to the <500 constituents), and a CRM to look after membership info- events, subscriptions, contact info, email blasts etc., plus a forum system such as phpBB.

Frankly put, as a non-developer, I am mostly clueless about the limitations of PHP. I have seen the developers' comments already about integration with Wordpress. There are however a number of WP plugins that allow the creation of multiple users with varying levels of access, but none of them are designed to function as well as CiviCRM seems to as a constituent manager.

My questions are these-
* Is it THEORETICALLY possible to integrate WP/WP plugins and CiviCRM so that they use the same SQL database and tables?
* If it is possible, is it desirable- are there security, operability issues?
* On a scale of 1-10, what would be the degree of difficulty?
* And what category of developer would I be looking for if it is at all possible?

Thanks,
Nick Howlett

Hi Nick!

I agree - WordPress really hits a sweet spot as far as making a CMS accessible to a lot of people goes. And I think that with the popularity it enjoys, some level of integration between WP and CiviCRM would bring CiviCRM to a lot of new users.

We've done some extensive work building on WordPress for the same reasons - its accessibility as a CMS makes it a good platform to build complex backend systems behind. One customer is using WordPress to present a large database of automotive recalls and resell PDF downloads of auto reviews; another is using the system to gather entomological sightings and transect data from volunteer scientific contributors.

I wouldn't say it's my favourite platform for building on top of, but WordPress is definitely very extensible. And CiviCRM in its standalone form would offer a lot of what you need anyway.

Your questions about integration can't be answered without knowing what sort of integration you're looking for. Exposing CiviCRM forms in WP pages? Adding CiviCRM list subscriptions to the user page for users logged into WP? Using WordPress to configure permissioning for CiviCRM access? Do you expect your CiviCRM contacts to log in and manage their own contact details? (These are just example questions ...)

Depending on your needs ...

WordPress + CiviCRM standalone might be all you need. It depends what CiviCRM functionality you intend to expose to your contacts (as opposed to the functions you want to make available only to your own staff).

OR, ... You might be able to have a few specific pages created - say, an email list signup page, and a contribution page - using a WordPress plugin which talked directly to CiviCRM via their published API or internal methods. If that covered your needs, then it probably would be a fairly painless approach. But it wouldn't give you access to the full power of CiviCRM as a tool you can expose to your full userbase; you'd be adding each component separately. Depending on your goals, this might be more work in the long term.

OR ... You should evaluate using Drupal, which doesn't come "out of the box" as friendly as WordPress, but in my opinion can be customised to be even more accessible than WordPress to staff who don't have in-depth computer skills. That would give you the full force of Drupal + CiviCRM, which is a really potent combination, and a very strong platform for building community sites. Drupal also offers some functionality that WordPress doesn't, like the ability to localise content so that each page may have an English or French version, rather than having separate pages for each.

(You indicate that you won't evaluate Drupal due to time constraints; I think it may be the shortest path to your project completion, so I'd encourage you to reconsider that. Perhaps Pete or I could give you a walkthrough of some example installations?)

OR ... you might look at sponsoring a WordPress branch of CiviCRM. I suggest you be circumspect about this approach; while there's perhaps potential desire for it in the community, I think you'd want to make sure that it was a project the CiviCRM core team were interested in, so that you wouldn't find yourself painted into a corner a couple of releases down the track. Creating a branch of CiviCRM for WordPress could be a demanding project to own. It might also be a killer product that brought CiviCRM to the masses ... and there seems to be enough interest in such a project that some kind of shared effort or community-driven project could get it there.

I suspect this last approach might not be insurmountable to get up and running, but I'd advise you consider carefully the ongoing costs of such an undertaking as well. CiviCRM is a fairly rapidly moving product - so far this has been more of an advantage for us than a problem, but it cuts both ways - and I've seen other sites and projects which have ended up left in the dust because they didn't plan for updates beyond their immediate goals.

So, to answer your questions, after a bit of a long intro:

 * Yes
 * Yes it sounds desirable; considerations, as well as security and interoperability, are futureproofing, real community demand, and whether your immediate needs actually require such a major project
 * CiviCRM on WordPress is probably the hardest approach you could take, so make sure you need the "whole sack of spuds" before you decide that's the right path. Have a good think about the easier options.
 * Look for someone who has a working and in-depth knowledge of both projects. They are very different codebases!

I hope that helps you - please do get in touch if you want to discuss further; we'd be really happy to talk more in-depth!

Cheers

Just saw you're considering phpBB as well for a forum aspect.

WordPress has a little-known sister project, bbPress.

It can integrate directly with WordPress user accounts, and is a much simpler and cleaner forum than phpBB. It doesn't come with as many bells and whistles as a christmas tree, but it does a good job of being as accessible for your staff as phpBB does.

Drupal also offers built-in forum functionality, and I think there are huge advantages in having the whole system under one roof. So I would urge you not to discount the benefit of this method.

For one customer we set up scripts which connected their membership DB and passed user details out to all of the various CMS/forum/blog systems they used - Drupal, MediaWiki, WordPress, and phpBB. I can say from experience that connecting disparate systems is not the simplest approach, and that they are very happy to have merged most of those systems into a single coherent system today.

(And that phpBB was a security nightmare. They may have improved things in v3, but they've lost a lot of people - me included - for good, based on bitter experiences in v2.)

Your head must be swimming with all these options ... I don't envy you

Took me a while to spot your reply - apologies

The forums which integrate best with CiviCRM will be the ones based on Drupal or Joomla.

That said, I do like bbPress, and have found it successful and reliable alongside WordPress. If you're sticking with Wordpress, I'd give bbPress the thumbs up.

If you're looking at Drupal now, I would recommend going with its forum software.