[drupal-devel] CiviCRM, Civicgroups, OG, Profile- Playing together

[neil at civicspacelabs.org]

On Fri, May 13, 2005 at 09:11:27AM +0200, Dries Buytaert wrote:
> On 12 May 2005, at 16:43, David Geilhufe wrote:
> >Or does it make sense for CiviCRM to "take over"
> >the Profile functionality if it's installed? (We
> >tend toword the latter approach to keep the model
> >cleaner and provide the opportunity for deeper
> >integration to a shared data model).
> >
> >We would love to get this discussion and decisions
> >going anywhere it might be appropriate (drupal-dev,
> >cs-dev, crm-dev).
> 
> I'm afraid none of us Drupal developers are familiar with CiviCRM. It 
> is hard to make recommendations without having looked at CiviCRM ...  
> The fact that user profiles don't have a "data model" is an interesting 
> point.  How did the FOAF module solve this?  I'd think a data model is 
> required to syndicate information between sites.  Either way, we're not 
> opposed to patches that make the profile module more 
> extensible/powerful.

FOAF really didn't have an ideal solution to this. Chris Messina had
some strong criticism for it:

# The FOAF module has the worst possible UI I've ever seen. It doesn't
# help you get started, it begins with a dirth of stupid fields that
# don't allow you to fix the problem of associating the fields with
# contact fields. Why doesn't the software do the association for you?!
#
# This module is ONE BIG DEAD END!
http://civicspacelabs.org/home/node/6939

Now with the location module we can have information about where a user
is located stored in a regular place. CiviCRM will be taking advantage
of this.

One of the main obstacles which we ran into while doing this integration
was finding a good place to get the complete user object when any user
records are updated. For example, implentations of the insert and update
ops remove the data they save from the user object so the CiviCRM module
wasn't guaranteed a complete user object.

-Neil