[consulting] consulting Digest, Vol 53, Issue 30

[Joe Murray]

Sarah,

Congrats on the good work you are doing for Jewish, Muslim and other
religious organizations. Some folks coming to the CiviCRM Meetups in Toronto
speak quite highly of you.

Just to echo parts of what Sami and Tim are saying: try to keep the level of
integration required between the Moodle and Drupal/CiviCRM parts of the site
to a minimum. Where it is necessary, try to make it as thin and standardized
as possible, or as loose and distant as possible. For example, give Moodle
and Drupal/CiviCRM complementary but separate branding, so you don't have to
replicate changes in both environments, especially not simultaneously. It
might even be good to make one application a subdomain, eg
crm.mycongregation.org. Also, you might want to try to avoid developing
integrated login by using LDAP for single sign-on, though of course setting
that up for Moodle and Drupal / CiviCRM can be its own small kettle of fish.
The objective as I see it would be to avoid having to maintain middleware
code that would have to be kept in synch with two or more projects that each
has its own upgrade cycle.

As this is starting to become fairly complex but is really useful for your
vertical, you might want to make it into a SaaS offering so that the setup
and maintenance costs (and expertise) can be reduced through scale and
allocated to more customers.

Mehta,
Joe

Joe Murray, PhD
President, JMA Consulting
joe.murray at jmaconsulting.biz
skype JosephPMurray twitter JoeMurray
416.466.1281

Sarah wrote:

Sami - The use case that I am thinking about is a community-driven
> website for a religious congregation. The demographics of the
> congregation is that about 30% are not computer-literate and will not
> use the website, and another 15% are very young children who also will
> not be using the website. So hooking CiviCRM into Drupal is already
> needed so the staff can keep track of the whole congregation including
> family relationships.
>
> The congregation also has a religious education program for kids and
> parents, plus an adult education program. This is the area where
> Moodle is being considered.
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.drupal.org/pipermail/consulting/attachments/20100624/56f18c34/attachment.html