CiviCRM
Contents
Installation[edit | edit source]
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 [1]
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:
- enable the components
- check/enable permissions (Drupal)
- set the headers and footers for mailings
- set the message template for mailings
- setup custom fieldsets and data fields
- 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. [2]
Interestingly, CiviCRM optionally uses wkhtmltopdf to convert HTML to PDF
Todo[edit | edit source]
todo Install, and use overrides for DEV/PROD and make sure you can use the installation on multiple hosts [3]
Notes[edit | edit source]
"Views" in Drupal (in core as of Drupal 8 [4]) 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
References[edit source]
- ↑ http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php?topic=28429.0
- ↑ But like since version 3, Pentaho still doesn't work even at 5. The install docs are missing. The thing failed to even load, with no error.
- ↑ http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC/Moving+an+Existing+Installation+to+a+New+Server+or+Location
- ↑ https://www.drupal.org/project/views
