CiviCRM - Joomla - Community Builder

[conticreative]

I am finally setting up CiviCrm after numerous server moves.
Today I installed it for the n time and I synchronized the users we collected in Community Builder while in the Dev phase of the build.
However, I noticed in looking at the users in CB and in CCRM that the address and other common data is not being captured by CCRM. Specifically, I tested my own profile where I know for a fact I have address AND TELEPHONE NUMBER specified in my CB profile.

CiviCRM has no trace of this data and I find that a bit disturbing as we classify our membership by state and we make a big deal of it (or at least we will) when they sign in to the site.

The other issue I have seen is that search does not seem to be able to find users by first name or username. The latter I can understand, but first name should be an option without using grep like strings.

OFFTopic: I assume that CiviMail is not available in the PHP4 version of the software, is it?

Thank you

[Donald Lobo]

I am finally setting up CiviCrm after numerous server moves.
Today I installed it for the n time and I synchronized the users we collected in Community Builder while in the Dev phase of the build.
However, I noticed in looking at the users in CB and in CCRM that the address and other common data is not being captured by CCRM. Specifically, I tested my own profile where I know for a fact I have address AND TELEPHONE NUMBER specified in my CB profile.

CiviCRM has no trace of this data and I find that a bit disturbing as we classify our membership by state and we make a big deal of it (or at least we will) when they sign in to the site.

note that civicrm has absolutely no idea about the various fields in CB and hence does not synchronize with any of them. The only synchronization that happens is between an email address in the joomla users table (jos_users) and a civicrm contact. i.e. if we find the same email address we match the two records, else we create a new contact with an email address and match this new contact with the user. (in 1.8 we also store the joomla name field as firstname / last name). CB is not involved in this at all. To best use your CB data, you might want to consider exporting your CB user data as a CSV file and then importing it into CiviCRM

The other issue I have seen is that search does not seem to be able to find users by first name or username. The latter I can understand, but first name should be an option without using grep like strings.

It was a tradeoff between speed for medium sized databases vs ease of use. We had quite a few complaints and opted for the speed route, and hence to match first name u have to use %FIRSTNAME. I suspect we will make this a admin level option in a future 2.x release

OFFTopic: I assume that CiviMail is not available in the PHP4 version of the software, is it?

No, but check this posting and that might be helpful:

http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,415.msg1996.html#msg1996

This hopefully should fit your needs

lobo

[conticreative]

Thank you Lobo. The CB issue is a bit of an issue. CB has some nice features that we want to use (User profils, photo galleries, podcasts), at the same time, CCRM has a great membership feature too. Ideally, it would be nice if the two could play together somehow, maybe through a cron job or some custom script.

I realize that CCRM is primarily a Drupal script, but there should be a way to make it play nice with some of the most used Joomla plug in such as CB.

In any event, I decided to upgrade my PHP on the server rather than wrestle with a version that is not going to be supported for long (as I heard elsewhere).

Thank you

Marco

[Donald Lobo]

Marco:

agreed, better integration with Joomla and CB would be awesome and much appreciated by CiviCRM and the joomla community So a code contribution would be most excellent

I dont think CiviCRM is primarily a drupal module There is pretty intense activity on svn to make CiviCRM standalone (in addition to joomla and drupal stuff). I think the drupal community has stepped up and contributed code and utilities to integrate CiviCRM with Drupal. It would be great if some folks from the Joomla! community do likewise

From a CiviCRM project perspective, we do not have the resources to integrate very closely with modules from various CMS'es. Our focus is more on integrating with the core CMS

lobo

[mcsmom]

Marco,

What you can do is to use civicrm to collect the address data and then display that data in a CB tab. I then have a menu link that goes to the profile to let people update information.  I can't post the plugin here, but if you search civicrm over at the CB forums you will find it. I think I also sent it out over the civicrm dev list.

[kenlyle]

Thanks, mcsmom.

I am still working out my strategy for a new site I am building in J 1.5.7 and CCRM 2.1,

Do your comments imply that you think that the profiling and registration in CCRM is better in itself, or better due to integration with the rest of the CCRM components?  I am leaning towards Yes to the second, and maybe even the first.

I am thinking that where I will draw the lines is that CCRM is the business bits, and CB is for the user/social/public profile/friends/connections piece.  If CB can display the CCRM data, that seems like a win.

But it looks like the sensible thing to do is to continue to use Joomla/CB for basic registration, then redirect on initial login(s) to the Civi Profiles to capture more info?

I am interested in others' thoughts on the subject.

Ken

[thesailor]

Any updates on this topic - I see lots about it -but no one really is taking the lead for development. A plugin idea here and there - a work around but no real integration talks...

I am willing to post the for $500 for community development - anyone else want to chip in so we can find a deeloper on CB and CiviCRM to work together?

[Donald Lobo]

Without knowing too many details, i suspect this is a 50-100 hours job. Developers typically charge between $50 - $100 USD / hour. You might want to ensure that that developer documents and supports the integration through at least 2 / 3 CiviCRM releases

lobo

[mcsmom]

Given that in 1.6 Joomla is going to have easily extendable profiles, I don't think a big integration with CB makes a lot of sense, It's easy to make a plugin for CB that displays data from a table and not that the CiviCRM tables are so much more easily structured it's even better.  The only thing stopping us from using civi the way people use it in Drupal is the need for plugins to expose more of the API to the Joomla front end.

[raniafekry]

Hello

I am interested to integrate Civicrm 3.0 with CB 1.2 Joomla 1.5.14 , did any body get it to work ..

I appreciate your kind help

Thank you
Rania

[EdP]

I agree with mcsmon. The problem at the moment is with J1.5, and the lack of extensible user tables. CB gets around this by having totally different user tables (as does Virtuemart and other things) so Joomla has a general problem that the main components don't integrate and hold user data in the same place. It's not CiviCRMs fault that it doesn't go searching around in all those duplicate user tables.

If/when the Joomla team manage to get Joomla 1.6 out, I assume that CB, Virtuemart et al will move to using the main users table and extending it appropriately. I don't know what approach CiviCRM will take, but it would certainly be helpful when CiviCRM is being altered to fit with J1.6 in due course if CiviCRM could also use/integrate with this table. That way when users update their website data, they can also update their CiviCRM data (even if that integration is just a "Do you want to update your club membership records" button on the Joomla user page, or an arrangement where Jooma users can specify which of community_builder_name, virtumart_user_ID or whatever there may be they want to take advantage of).

But this is all hypothetical until the Joomla team can actually get a stable release of J1.6 out. Given that they've been in alpha1 for months, they're not building much confidence in that direction and it certainly looks as if CiviCRM 3.1 will be out long before J1.6 is.

[zesgar]

I am looking into writing some code towards this....I am will probably be writing code for 1.5 right now until 1.6 gets rolling but if you have insight into how civicrm will play with 1.6 please message me so I can be prepared for that!