Volunteer Centres in Ireland

[ai]

We have been working with charities and government agencies in Ireland for some time now, mostly using Mambo. One of our bigger projects has been a community portal http://www.ballyfermot.ie, currently in Mambo though we are probably going to convert to Joomla.

We are in early stages develop a portal and volunteer management solution for volunteering in Ireland. At present we are thinking of combining several projects to accomplish this.
Joomla for the main website information
A modified version of mambo-phpshop to display volunteer opportunities and information on organisations offering them.
An open source CRM, probably SugarCRM to allow workers in various volunteer centres to manage volunteer opportunities and client organisations. SugarCRM has a Mambo plugin that allows people who register as users to be entered as 'Leads' in the CRM.

Another feature of this project is that individual Volunteer Centres in various parts of the country will maintain their own web site, but will be able to share the data on opportunities from a central database. We haven't quite worked this part out yet but we have some ideas.

Any thoughts or suggestions are welcome.

[cozimek]

Hi ai,

In your efforts to look for a CRM system to integrate with your Joomla solution, you might want to take a look at the CiviCRM component.  This new component was made specifically for the public sector, and can be found at the new Joomla Forge.

http://developer.joomla.org/sf/projects/civicrm

Best,
Ryan

[ai]

I have tried to install this on a couple of different platforms without success. My main web servers are running DirectAdmin control panel and have the following:
Apache 1.3.31
MySQL 4.0.17
PHP Version 4.3.8
In this setup it completed the installation but failed to create database tables.

I also tried it on a Windows/Wamp 5 setup with
Apache/1.3.33 (Win32)
PHP version : 5.0.4
MySQL version : 4.1.10a-nt - extension : mysqli
In this setup it refused to install and generated a timeout error.

In both cases I unpacked the installer into the /administrator/components/com_installer folder. In both cases i was trying with Joomla 1.01

I'll be trying it on another local Linux server tommorrow. Is there any way to set it up manually? I just want to be able to see what it looks like.