Voluntary Groups vs Volunteers vs Supporters

[humvee]

Hi all,

No I am not creating the latest online war game .............

What I am trying to do is create a site that hosts and allows voluntary groups, charities community groups to register themselves and to post their requirements for volunteers,resources  and donations, then I also want to be able to have volunteers register themselves their particular skills and allow them to register their interest in particular groups' resource request, I then also want to be able to have supporters (financial donations) register themselves and either "post" money to a central fund or link directly into an organisation and post funds to them. On top of this there will also be people who are in need of the support of some these groups who will need to register their interest.

I have done a fair bit of digging around but not really found anything that comes close to this (I know I am after a lot) but at the moment there is a lot of splintered organisations and community requirements that aren't met in one place and I am trying to pull these together.

Does anyone know of such a beast or a way of linking any existing components together. I am relatively new to Joomla having started the with M4.5.2.3. I have so far used SMF, Simpleboard, CB, PMSII, FlashChat, Coppermine, Remository, Bookmarks, and have bridged these where necessary.

I am currently (well about to start) testing the CiviCRM and SugarCRM systems having read through many of the encouraging posts in this forum to see what they give me.

Any advice would be gratefully received.

H

[dmcole]

See this thread ...

http://www.mambers.com/showthread.php?t=10637

I don't know if this ever got off the ground, and while it doesn't have the terminology you want to use, I think it would meet your basic needs.

Please report back to us what you found.

Best of luck.

\dmc

[lobo]

(disclaimer: I am the lead developer for CiviCRM)

Thats an interesting project and I dont CiviCRM (or any other CRM) can support your requirement straight out of the box without some amount of custom programming / modification. CiviCRM does allow you to do a few things in v1.2 which will make your life easier (and more improvements along those lines in v1.3)

For CiviCRM, you should definitely use the features from CiviCRM Profile which allows you to create Contacts and collect other specific information that you need (via Custom Groups and Custom Data). The latest version allows you to add people to groups and also "categorize" them at the input stage. We also have a pretty well defined API for custom programming needs. You can read more about it at:

http://objectledge.org/confluence/displ ... RM+Profile

http://objectledge.org/confluence/displ ... ublic+APIs


We have a pretty vibrant community and we'd love to hear your experience / help you come up with a system that solves some of your issues. You can join our mailing list at:

http://objectledge.org/confluence/displ ... RM+Profile

regards

lobo

[humvee]

Hi lobo,

Funnily enough I chose yours to start with and have spent the day initially getting it installed and now "playing" with it. v1.2 installed (once I had actually read the forums herein to find the manual installation :P) onto a Joomla 1.3 site with Community Builder and Simple Board forums already installed.

No major problems as such but I would like to be able to easily alter the address configuration (I am UK based as will be the site ultimately) and  unfortunately having the American/Canadian address selectors is not too practical. I did notice that the database tables incorporate a lot of additional country/county/state/province/town/city data- is there already a way of doing this easily that I have just plain missed?

I have found one "glitch" whether it is of my making or newness to the component that has caused it but in the Admin CiviCRM page when I click on "Synchronize Users to Contacts" i pass to an error page saying the database>users table does not exist. This seems to have arisen as there is no way to enter the databases prefix code when doing the install. My database uses "vow_"  - as in vow_users (well in fact vow_comprofiler) - for the table name prefixes.

This aside it still seems to be picking up the users (at least my admin account) so far so it is not that "critical" for me. I imagine it might be if someone is adding the software to a site that already has an established userbase in Joomla/CB.

Overall the initial feeling is there is major potential in using this so I will kick on and see where it takes me.

I appreciate the time and effort that you both and the growing followers team have put into this.

Regards

H

[lobo]

Hey Humvee:

good choice To respond to your specific questions:

1. check: ./com_civicrm/civicrm/modules/config.inc.php.sample

That has a bunch of variables which control the country/state selections, including the UK. U can tweak the constant:

define( 'CIVICRM_PROVINCE_LIMIT' , 'US' );


The config file for a mambo install is: config.inc.php at the top level

2. You can set your user table name (and thus account for table prefixing) using another config variable

define( 'CIVICRM_UF_USERSTABLENAME', 'users' );

3. v1.3 will allow support for address configuration. If you are using CiviCRM Profile to collect information, you can decide the order of the fields etc at the Profile level

4. mistake in the url for our mailing list. You can join it and post your questions there (faster response), the url is:

http://lists.objectledge.net/mailman/listinfo/crm-dev

lobo

[humvee]

Thanks for this lobo.

Will give it all a try a little later I really must get some sleep now - I keep getting carried away with investigating all of this new software and lose track of the time It's all just too damn good.!!
H

[lobo]

hey humvee:

quick stupid i18n/l10n question (i'm not the project's internationalization guy). How is the address structure different for UK/other coutries compared to what we have now? is the ordering different?

lobo

[humvee]

Hi Lobo,
Very very belatedly got back to trying to implement the software for my project.
I am having significant problems getting the country & state/province localisation tweaked for UK addresses. As well as getting the software to access the Joomla mos_users table currently labeled "test1_user".
The installation goes extremely smoothly - I then go to the config.inc.php file as you said in your earlier post and change the settings:

Code: Select all

define( 'CIVICRM_UF_USERSTABLENAME', 'test1_users' ); 

Code: Select all

define( 'CIVICRM_PROVINCE_LIMIT' , 'UK' ); 

define( 'CIVICRM_LC_MESSAGES' , 'en_GB' );

When I then enter the adminsistration menu to add a new individual or to synchronise with the Joomla User table I get errors.

I have tried many different combinations of entry and installation to try and resolve this - editing files before install, editing mysql tables directly and all to no avail.

I have looked through the forums here and the various notes at the CiviCRM home sites but with no resolution. Any assistance would be appreaciated.

WRT the address format the minor query I have is the sequence of country=>state/province=>county : whereas UK is country=>county

One thought I did have is whether there could be some form of install interface whereby you can select the format of this as well as post (zip) codes etc

Look forward to hearing from you (or anyone else who has encountered/"solved" my query).

humvee

[humvee]

sorry bit of a "ps" on the back of this - I am still using the version 1.2 - as 1.3 won't install at all. Using latest stable release of Joomla 1.0.5 php 4x and MYSQL 4x. - and I was really keen to look at the lastest features

[lobo]

we definitely should get you running first on 1.3 before doing anything else. what are the errors u r seeing? lets get that working before we address your other issues

lobo

[lobo]

i'd like to move and centralize CiviCRM support at the following forum, so lets move the discussion there.

http://forum.joomla.org/index.php/topic,27346.0.html

thanx

lobo