By erixooon on

Hi,
I am wondering if it is a good idea to install CIVICRM to Drupal company site?
Obviously I don't want to damage the existing presentation.

The idea is to be able to "connect" the customer with the product (or service) purchased (that are stored in existing Drupal website database).

Any clue?

Thanks!

eX

⋅ Categories: Drupal 7.x

Comments

VM’s picture

VM commented

I'd test in a testing environment regardless of the response.

petednz’s picture

petednz commented

This question seems hard to answer since you are providing so little in terms of requirements. In terms of basics, CiviCRM is deployed on approx 10000 sites, most of them are Drupal. CiviCRM adds a fairly comprehensive CRM to Drupal.
All Users are connected via uf_match table to Contacts.
Contacts do not need to be associated with a User.
CiviCRM provides forms/features for Donations, Memberships, Events, Activities (tasks) and much more.
Contacts can be related to each other, eg employee to their Company.

In Drupal there are added capabilities in as much as
- CiviCRM integrates with Webforms
- CiviCRM data is available in Views
- some CiviCRM actions can be implemented via VBO
- CiviCRM Entities module means you can build Drupal Rules to fire off CiviCRM triggers.
- integration can be achieved with either Commerce and Ubercart though in our experience we have moved away from using the integration modules to doing the work directly via Drupal Rules for pushing and updating civicrm data based on purchases.

hth

peter davis : fuzion : connect.campaign.communicate : www.fuzion.co.nz

Chasen’s picture

Chasen commented

Further to the advice above, I've used CiviCRM on two sites before, one of them was quite complex and I can definitely echo both the extensive test environment suggestion as well as the clearly defined requirements point.

In terms of requirements, CiviCRM is quite a large suite of products so you'll want to clearly define what you need the system to do, and whether a) you do it with other smaller modules + drupal, or b) can you do it with CiviCRM and what modules do you enable/leave disabled as Civi has it's own suite of sub-modules.

You'll want to do up a list of all your use cases in terms of requirements so you can adequately test the functionality. I found Civi quite hard to start off with but after a while I got used to it and it's complexities turned into advantages once you know what you're doing - kind of like Views (you can be a bit confused when you first start using it but once you get used to it it's very powerful)

Also make use of the CiviCRM support forums, from personal experience there's a great group of people over there with a good attitude about getting you the help you need, so I would post over there before posting on the Drupal forums for specific CiviCRM related stuff - especially once you define your requirements and you can get their input on how best to achieve the result with Civi