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Author Topic: Membership directory info for school parent-teacher group  (Read 2575 times)

ThePayIsLousy

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Membership directory info for school parent-teacher group
April 04, 2009, 11:37:58 am
[If this has been answered elsewhere, please shoot me a link.  I spent over two hours reading and playing around and testing before posting this...]

Our high school parent-teacher group would like to electronically collect information to create a printed student telephone directory.  Info example:  Student's Name, Address, Phone #, Grade, Parent/guardian name(s), E-mail address

I thought of using a Google Docs form/spreadsheet, but that has the major disadvantage of being a very limited functionality data collector -- users can resubmit the form, but there is no way for them to edit their info at some future time (meaning that we'd have to sort records by student name and form submission timestamp, remove duplicates and resolve conflicting info -- about 2,000 entries to process).

Professional applications like QuickBase would work (I think) -- but we would incur a yearly fee.  We're not an especially affluent group, unfortunately.  So, perhaps I can put my computer science degrees to good use...

Here's what I was thinking (please ignore and tell me your idea if you have a better way):

--Install CiviCRM, either standalone or in conjunction w/ Joomla or Drupal.  [I have already installed Joomla and Drupal on my Go Daddy host to play with.]

--Allow parents to create an account for each student (or, if easy to set up, a family account that handles multiple students).

--After some cutoff date, we could then dump the database to an Excel spreadsheet and print the directory.

Am I dreaming, or is this something that CiviCRM can help me do?  I was hoping that a CiviCRM expert could weigh in before I jump right in... 

Thank you!

     Mike

Donald Lobo

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Re: Membership directory info for school parent-teacher group
April 04, 2009, 07:51:52 pm

CiviCRM can do this quite easily if you create an account per student. Just collect all the information you need at registration time and they can come back and edit their profile. You can export the data as CSV and then use that to print the directory

Creating one account / family will require a fair amount of code modifications

lobo


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ThePayIsLousy

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Re: Membership directory info for school parent-teacher group
April 04, 2009, 10:27:04 pm
Thanks, lobo.  Will the standalone do me, or do I need a CMS?  I just installed the standalone and will play w/ it tomorrow. 

From what I read, I expected setting civiCRM up on Go Daddy (aka GoDaddy) to be very difficult.  It was a piece of cake.  I think I'll add a FAQ to the forum.

Donald Lobo

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Re: Membership directory info for school parent-teacher group
April 05, 2009, 07:36:23 am

For your specific use case, i would probably go with Drupal rather than standalone. There is better "registration" integration in the CiviCRM/Drupal combination

lobo
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ThePayIsLousy

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Re: Membership directory info for school parent-teacher group
April 05, 2009, 01:07:48 pm
Thanks again.  I played w/ the standalone a bit today to get an idea of how to make  things work.  I'll now blow away my test Drupal and civiCRM standalone installations and start over from scratch w/ a clean Drupal and civiCRM for Drupal install....

I searched everywhere for a basic dummies guide ("How to get started post-install").  Is there a doc or screencast that walks the novice user through a simple setup like the one I'm contemplating?  All I found were individual pieces of documentation, non-techie 20,000 foot views, and examples of completed systems (e.g. Amnesty Int'l).  If no such doc exists, I'll take some notes and make one. 

Donald Lobo

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Re: Membership directory info for school parent-teacher group
April 05, 2009, 02:59:48 pm

There is a CiviCRM Book Sprint coming in May that help new users out significantly (or so we hope)

for now http://docs.civicrm.org/ is your best bet. Also you might want to check out some of the screencasts, this should give you a good overview of how to set things up

http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC/Screencasts

lobo
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  • CiviCRM Community Forums (archive) »
  • Old sections (read-only, deprecated) »
  • Support »
  • Pre-installation Questions (Moderator: Dave Greenberg) »
  • Membership directory info for school parent-teacher group

This forum was archived on 2017-11-26.