[consulting] consulting Digest, Vol 52, Issue 14

[Joe Murray]

So Matt, I'm unclear on whether your vision for Drupal CRM and work on it
involves integrating with and leveraging CiviCRM or redeveloping from the
ground up, or maybe both.

In the short term I am interested in allowing Drupal's goodness as a dev
framework to supplement the user focussed built-in functionality of CiviCRM.


Creating a data layer in Drupal to access CiviCRM's database is a great
start, since this will presumably enable stuff to built on top of it. D7's
shift from node to entities and other more generic standards like a Schema,
EntityController, etc will avoid the ugliness and waste of things like
synching up CiviCRM with copies in Drupal nodes, or membership in an OG and
a CiviCRM group.

In the medium and longer term there may some ability to share efforts
between a Drop CRM and CiviCRM. However, at the moment I see a fair degree
of divergence. Drop is oriented towards a commercial rather than non-profit
organization. All CRM's share a great deal of functionality, however, and
there are benefits to having a larger install base and developer community
for an open source software project / install profile. For example, Convio
has reskinned and extended SalesForce.com for the non-profit world in its
Common Ground SaaS offering. The second area where I have trouble imagining
a full convergence is that CiviCRM supports Joomla as well as Drupal. I have
trouble imagining Joomla folks wanting to have a Drupal as well as Joomla
install on their system.

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


Date: Sat, 8 May 2010 17:19:27 -0700
> From: Matt Chapman <matt at ninjitsuweb.com>
> Subject: Re: [consulting] CiviCRM comments (Re: CiviCRM / Drupal
>        integration     expert)
> To: "A list for Drupal consultants and Drupal service/hosting
>        providers"      <consulting at drupal.org>
> Message-ID:
>        <z2v80badb991005081719hbec42985z795536efd2df9fd6 at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> On Thu, May 6, 2010 at 10:56 AM, Donald A. Lobo <lobo at yahoo.com> wrote:
> > * As matt has mentioned, we do think talk is silver, code is golden.
>
> Here's some code:
>
> git clone git://github.com/matt2000/profile.git
>
> (make sure you're getting the 'civicrm' branch -- i'm new to github
> and not sure how to direct you beyond that.)
>
> I would NOT call this a proof-of-concept. Merely a silly Saturday
> experiment. On install, the profile2_civicrm module reads the
> Contact.xml database schema definition from CiviCRM, and creates the
> fields using Drupal 7 Field API on the Profile2 'main' profile entity.
>
> In reality, this is almost definitely the wrong thing to do; we'd
> probably want to create our base tables with Schema API and add an
> EntityController (both of which can also be automated from CiviCRM's
> XML, if it seems like a good idea to do so.) Field API would be used
> just for adding 'custom' fields to our Entities. But I already know
> how to use SchemaAPI and wanted to practice more with Fields, so this
> was my exercise for the day.
>
> You can see here a roadmap for the kind of code work I think is needed
> to get Drupal CRM off the ground:
>
> http://www.dropcrm.org/
>
> Please forgive the rough start there; we're just starting to get
> organized. Feel free to jump in and help flesh out ideas; all pages
> are wiki'd. Let's be realistic; we're not going to have a release in a
> month. A year or more to 1.0rc is not an unreasonable expectations.
> But based on the discussions I've had since DCSF, there are more than
> enough people who know that it's time to start breaking the dependency
> on external systems in order to build the best possible CRM for
> Drupal.
>
> For more golden code & places to help out, see:
>
> http://drupal.org/project/profile2
> http://drupal.org/project/entity
>
> http://drupal.org/project/issues/views?text=&status=All&priorities=All&categories=All&version=7.x&component=All
>
> http://drupal.org/project/issues/date?text=&status=Open&priorities=All&categories=All&version=7.x&component=All
> http://github.com/Vertice/features
> http://github.com/damz/postaladdress
> http://github.com/drupalcommerce/drupalcommerce
>
>
> All the Best,
>
> Matt Chapman
> Ninjitsu Web Development
>
> --
> The contents of this message should be assumed to be Confidential, and
> may not be disclosed without permission of the sender.Message: 1
>
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