CiviCRM

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Installation

CiviCRM sits on top of a CMS: either Drupal, WordPress, or Joomla!.

The CiviCRM User and Administrator Book and also the wiki (see https://civicrm.org/go/books) are invaluable in getting setup.

When installing on top of Drupal, if you have the HTMLPurifier module enabled, you will run into a conflict that you can resolve by disabling the module in Drupal proper, or else modifying the bootstrap code in civicrm

Also, the default theme (and most other themes?) don't work well for CiviCRM - especially the admin side. So, drush dl civi_bartik and enable it for the admin side.

After installation, there is a checklist that you should complete (e.g. http://example.org/civicrm/admin/configtask)

Some of the things needed for a first-time setup:

1. Enable the CiviBartik theme, for Civi admin, and then immediately configure various blocks to NOT appear in that theme (remove everything from column two, so that you get a wide display)
2. enable the components
3. check/enable permissions (Drupal)
4. set the headers and footers for mailings
5. set the message template for mailings
6. setup custom fieldsets and data fields. Before you do this, learn about Option Groups
7. map import data to fields, groups, tags. Also do a large amount of data wrangling (normalization; and ETL) to get source data in a format suitable for use with CiviCRM. The data that I have is "composite" because it has individuals embedded inside organization records. So I needed to extract and flatten out contact records from their organization records; plus create and maintain a simple "external ID" system to relate them after import. This means parsing, slicing and dicing, string manipulation and making corrections or formatting data a particular way. I almost installed Pentaho Data Integration (kettle) because that tool is (supposedly) built for this job.
8. Be sure to tag each import with some unique tag. You can always remove those tags later (easily). When you inevitably run into problems during import, the proper way to delete records is to search by tag, and delete.
9. Option Groups. There are many things in CiviCRM that are already configured as "Option Groups". "Website" is one example. When adding an Organization or Contact, and you want to enter data about their website, it could be one of many types: main, work, personal, facebook, twitter, pinterest, github etc. These are defined in the option group for "website". You can modify these to suit your data and your needs. As another example, "Campaign Type" comes defined as 'Direct Mail', 'Referral Program', and 'Customer Engangement'. I added 'Marketing' so that I can do a generic (email/web) marketing campaign.
10. If you plan to use the CiviCase component to manage the common constituent "projects" or "workflows" and their associated timelines, then you'll need to create your own "Case Types". Look at the existing "Case Types" for reference.
11. todo review docs and setup cron to do things like geocoding
12. Test and set your SPF record for your domain so that you can use Mailer, and review the docs for email system configuration

Interestingly, CiviCRM optionally uses wkhtmltopdf to convert HTML to PDF

Todo

• todo Install, and use overrides for DEV/PROD and make sure you can use the installation on multiple hosts

Extensions

See https://civicrm.org/extensions/drupal

API

1. todo Learn the Civi API (/civicrm/api) http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC/API+Examples

Notes

"Views" in Drupal (in core as of Drupal 8 ) is a good way to get reports from your data. If you want to use "Views" for your CiviCRM instance, you have to manually integrate it http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC/Views3+Integration Admin = civicrm/admin/setting/uf

Sender Policy Framework

HyperText Markup Language = structured text that uses logical links (hyperlinks) between nodes containing text.

Portable Document Format = a widely used standard for representing documents electronically and print. PDF

Application Programming Interface