Creating Your First Contact

This handbook assumes you are working with a fresh installation of CRM Core in Drupal with all associated modules installed and enabled.

From the contacts screen in CRM Core, click on the link to add a contact. This will take you to the page for creating a new contact.

Users are presented with a list of all contact types in the system. CRM Core comes with a list of pre-configured contact types, including individuals, households and organizations. These contact types can be deleted, and you can create your own through the administrative screens that are available for CRM Core.

Discussions about how to administer CRM Core come later in this handbook. For now, let's create an individual.

The first thing you will notice is there is only one field for collecting information about the contact, the name field. Every contact is a person or a group of people, and the name field is required as part of every contact record. CRM Core will allow you to configure as many additional custom fields as you want, but this field will always be present as part of a contact record.

Enter your name and hit the Save Individual button. This will take you back to the contacts screen for CRM Core. Click on your name to see the contact record.

The first thing to notice with contact records are the tabs appearing above. CRM Core makes it easy to manage contacts for people who are already familiar with how to manage content in their Drupal website. It works the same way as managing content, there's no need to learn a new system (not yet, at least).

The big difference is that CRM Core contacts will also include links to the activity and relationships screens. These tabs are used to display information about the contact beyond the personal details associated with the contact record. Developers can create their own tabs for displaying contact information and attach them to contact records as well. This creates some interesting possibilities for the interface.