CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hi,

we're considering using civicrm for our organisation. We are Belgian ngo on sustainable mobility.

The first thing we looked at was using civicrm to replace a number of spreadsheets with contactinformation (subscibers to our magazine, members, press contacts, etc)

Noticing the functionality of civicrm we could probably go a step further but we are not sure if it's possible and doable.
Here is the situation:

We have a central website (drupal) for our organisation. The idea is to integrate civicrm for following tasks:
- contact database (members, press contacts, etc..)
- manage subscribers of our print-magazine
- maybe manage events (trainings, lectures, etc.)

Apart from the main site we have two separate campaign sites for our to campaign weeks. These sites change every year and are used to promote different actions and activities. Now we use simple webforms (in fact they are contenttypes of drupal) to allow people te register or subscribe to some actions. The data of the participants is later downloaded to a spreadsheet in order to use it for promotion.
Integrating the information of these participants in our main contactdatabase using civicrm would be great.

Our questions are:
- Can we connect the different sites on one civicrm-installation (the campaign sites are hosted on a different server than the main server)
- Do we have to configure all groups from the start or can we make groups later

All other suggestions or examples are welcome

Pieter

Re: using different sites --

You can configure Civi so that it uses a different MySQL database than your CMS. You may be able to work this in such a way that the individual installations on each sub-site accesses the single db on your main site. You'd be managing separate codebases for each site though. And you'd definitely want to test thoroughly. Especially to make sure the user authentication functions work as expected.