[consulting] CiviCRM comments (Re: CiviCRM / Drupal integration expert)

[Donald A. Lobo]

hey folks:

figured i'd throw in my 2 cents and thoughts on the discussion happening here.

* As matt has mentioned, we do think talk is silver, code is golden. matt has mentioned and has been pushing the "idea" of using drupal as a framework that will work across multiple CMS'es. If someone does prove that this is possible, we'd be happy to take a closer look at it. For 4.0 we will be moving away from PEAR and will consider and evaluate Zend/Symfony/Cake (and others)

* CiviCRM is a drupal module from a protocol interface perspective only (i.e. it implements the hooks needed). Yes, it does use a completely different set of technologies than drupal which basically doubles the learning curve for a developer. 

* We have learned and adopted an incredible amount from Drupal. Specifically, in the past few releases, we've aggresively introduced a lot of hooks into the system. In retrospect, we should have done a lot of this at a much earlier stage. We also switched from dojo to jQuery

* For those not closely following CiviCRM development, the UI has been improved significantly in the 3.x release and 3.2 takes this even further. With the help of Rayogram (a community participant), we've redone a lot of the CSS which should make theming significantly easier. We've also spent a lot of time looking and optimizing various parts of the system (and yes there is a lot more we can do to make things even more efficient). Yes Civi is resource heavy and we do plan on improving this aspect in future releases.

* We continue to integrate with more and more drupal modules. Jim Taylor has done an excellent job with the Views integration which makes it easier for Drupal developers. Our integration with Drush and more recently Aegir should also be useful and beneficial to the community (this was also another community led project, kasper s and koumbit.org). Community help with integration with other modules like rules / wysiwyg api etc would really benefit the project.

* I do think our recent theming changes will help folks make the transition between drupal (or joomla) screens and civicrm focussed screens. if there are things that will make it even easier, let us know / help us with the patch and we can try to get it into 3.2

* Things like non-integration with Authorize.net ARB etc are not present, primarily because there were not many folks who needed it / willing to develop it. We do have integration with 10+ payment processors.

* In the past our focus has been a lot on the users and features they need rather than how to develop with extensibility in mind. We are learning and improving on our process. As Joe mentioned we have pretty good ratings from our user base, which is also quite important from our perspective

lobo