CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hello,

Our web developer will not be done designing our site for a few months, but I would like to get started using and customizing CiviCRM. Is this possible? If so, can you please tell me how in teeny tiny syllables?

Thanks!!

What if you're not starting from scratch with CiviCRM? My organizations website is not (currently) with Drupal or Joomla, and I have no idea if I'll decide to go that route in the future. I'm the only staff member and it would probably mean *me* learning Drupal or Joomla and redesigning the site myself for much much less money than that task is worth. But maybe it would make sense to migrate Standalone CiviCRM to Drupal or Joomla and just keep the CiviCRM parts of our site looking different from the main site.

Part of the reason I didn't install those versions at first was that it seemed like a purely aesthetic choice. I didn't realize there were functionality differences.

I apologize for not giving adequate information.

First, my board is, on average, confused about OpenID and why they should need one. My impression with Drupal is that they can have  usernames and pwds. Since I already administer their e-mail accounts, I'm suspecting that I can give them userIDs that will look just like their e-mail account names. Yes, *I* understand that their OpenIDs are just their e-mails, basically, but they are all wigged by going to the external site to set it up. (I did set up all their openID's as emailusername.ourdomain.org, but they're still confused.)

Second, most of the times that I've had a problem or confusion, and searched the forums, *most*of the people are using one of the CMS versions, and many of the answers relate to this. Changing settings, altering files, etc. most of the instructions come on how to do that in the CMS.

Lastly, it *seems*, though I could be wrong, that branding the publicly accessible parts of CiviCRM to look at least kindof like our main site will be possible, which I didn't know before. I haven't worked in online since 1998, which, as I understand it, was well before CMS were popular (or existing?). So I bravely thought I could shoulder my way through making all the aesthetic changes via CSS (which I also haven't worked with since 1998!) Now that I know more about what CMS are, it seems like, learning curve aside, it will make my life easier in the long run.

Thus, my question is, with a reasonably populated database (1200+ contacts, 50+ events, 30+ contributions 30+ memberships), how do I migrate from standalone to drupal without losing data?