CiviCRM, Community Builder, & Joomla

[newscience]

I settled on Joomla and Community Builder early in the process of developing my NPO site. Then I realized I needed many other functions, and found CiviCRM, and imagined adding this. CiviCRM seems to have grown quite a bit, and *seems* to me to now include the functionality of Community Builder, which would then be redundent for anyone using CiviCRM (though great for those who don't need the power of CiviCRM, and its hassles).

I am close to rolling out the site, and need to decide just what to implement.

Am I correct in this assestment, or am I missing something about Community Builder?

Thanks in advance,

Christian

[janieluk]

Don't know why you haven't had any answers to this. CiviCRM is based on Drupal, which is Joomla's nearest rival in Open Source CRM / community systems. You might need to look carefully at the two options before taking this further.

EDIT: Oops. Was thinking of CivicSpaces, which is a Drupal distribution with CiviCRM built in. Still and all, CiviCRM does seem to have closer links to Drupal than to Joomla.

[lobo]

actually civicrm works with both drupal and joomla via a very thin "CMS" layer (i.e. our integration with both the CMS is not as tight as some purists would advocate)

i dont know enough about community builder to really comment on this one way or the other

lobo

[dmcole]

This is really a sore point for me -- part of the reason I've skipped answering is because it makes me mad to think about this -- so search out some of my other tirades and add as much salt (at least a grain) as you think is necessary.

Essentially, Community Builder is all about the tabs -- the ability for a site designer to avail users of their own data and the data of others in the community. In addition to displaying tabs in a user profile, Community Builder handles this by synching up its database of users with Joomla's db of users. After an initial installation, this synching should happen automatically, but if it doesn't, CB has a built-in tool to make the two DBs agree with one another.

I believe the notion of allowing the members of a community to maintain their own data (phone numbers, e-mail addresses, physical addresses) to be paramount in any site for an association, club or non-profit organization. Actually, "allowing" isn't the right word: the burden of keeping their data current then falls directly to members, instead of the burned-out cases who normally maintain this stuff (i.e.: me in a number of past lives).

CiviCRM is all about the management of community-member data by a centralized team. At the present time (correct me if I'm wrong, Lobo), community members can't maintain their own data, though they can enter their own data while "joining" a CiviCRM-powered organization (be that a Drupal- or Joomla-powered site).

The centralized part of CiviCRM is as good as anything out there -- its roots in eBase are clear and it transcends that application by a mile. The closest comparable LAMP/WAMP/MAMP solution is InfoCentral, which is no longer being developed.

But the key piece missing right now is to use CiviCRM as the master db for the users of a Joomla site. In other words, there is currently no way to synch the CiviCRM db of contacts with the Joomla db of users.

This feature is on the roadmap, but appears to be a ways away.

And, once that feature is implemented, I don't know how well CiviCRM and CB will play together (two external DBs synching themselves to a master Joomla DB? I shudder at the thought).

I think there's no question you could beat CB into submission to provide a number of the same functions at CiviCRM, but a couple of the key components -- especially the concept of a household -- would have to fall by the wayside. I think many organizations -- especially the faith-based ones -- need to be able to household data. One of my clients bases its memberships around families (though in practice, they base memberships around households, but that's a fine distinction -- divorce can be a complicator of membership management).

No, the solution is to provide web site users with the ability to alter their own contact data in CiviCRM (yet keeping vast quantities of data untouchable) and some methodology that passes a Joomla sign-on request over to CiviCRM for authorization. Could you use the Joomla 1.5 LDAP plug-in and the OpenLDAP/CiviCRM mashup to do this? Probably. But since I can't even get Joomla 1.5 working in anything but an artificial test environment -- coupled with the need of the CiviCRM/OpenLDAP lashup to use MySQL 5.x -- I'm probably not going to be the guy to make that happen. And, despite a couple of attempts, I still don't have OpenLDAP working. Hell, I can't even get a proprietary LDAP server implementation which *is* working to communicate with its proprietary client.

The CiviCRM folks are more than willing to support a developer (or developers) taking on this project, but my ham-fisted programming skills are certainly not up to the task and I have no money to fund such development.

Hence, a club I promised a bunch of features to for its web site in late 2004 remains in a static HTML environment while I continue to wait for either CiviCRM to provide the features of Community Builder, or Community Builder to provide the features of CiviCRM.

OK, enuf.

\dmc

[lobo]

DMC:

As always thanx for the detailed post and comments.

I think CiviCRM v1.0 - v1.1 focussed on the "centralized" database concept. However our users and associates smacked us nicely on the head and basically made us rethink the notion of CRM data and exposing it to the user, so a user can manage / edit / add their CRM record wherever/whenever

This has been incredibly effective and folks have used it a lot across hundreds of drupal sites etc. In joomla-land, i suspect mcsmom uses this feature . In v1.5 we allow people to edit their "CRM" record, the admin of the CiviCRM site defines what the user can see/edit, more details here:

http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/disp ... RM+Profile

Drupal allows a "component" to embed forms in Drupal pages. Thus CiviCRM can extend Drupal regisration with a CiviCRM profile (check:

http://demo.civicrm.org/drupal/user/register

(the constituent information section is from CiviCRM). Similarly when a user edits their "account information", they edit their CiviCRM data

We've got the functionality in CiviCRM. I was hoping/praying that Joomla 1.5 would allow such 'extensions'. However when the 1.5 beta came out, we figured out it does not (there is a thread on the forum with Jinx confirming this). Our next option is to build a custom "login"/"account" page, something which we suspect the "Kabissa" project will take care of (http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/disp ... ifications)

You can get your users to edit their "CRM" data by sending them to the profile edit url. Am happy to work with folks to document this and make it simple for other folks to follow. I suspect elin waring (mcsmom) could help out here

lobo

[newscience]

Many thanks to both DMC and Lobo for moving this along; it is an example of the best of open source and of true community building and enabling.

I would encourage you, Lobo, to move ahead with documenting this; and perhaps with mcsmom include Joomla. It is especially encouraging to hear how the team has taken the issue to heart; it really does seem central to the whole idea of on-line community building.

I am also grateful to both of you for clarifying the issues; I have a much better handle on what was previously just an unconscious discomfort.

Christian Sweningsen
NewScience Alliance