Need PHP dev to assist with CiviCRM

General Technical
1

Ohai.

We’re looking at using CiviCRM as a backend for managing our membership database in the interim until a better system can be found or developed.

I am having difficulty reasoning about the best way to go about linking a custom membership application form to the CiviCRM API such that we can do the following (in order of priority):

  • Have a standalone form on a separate server (isolation, security, flexibility, etc)
  • Handle the requirements of state party registrations (different data needs to be entered)
  • Allowing members to update their details without Secretarial intervention and without needing an account (using UUID, date of birth and last name as credentials for example)

If someone wants to help me try to bash out a logical spec on this, it would be much appreciated.

2

No takers for Civi? Surely there is an alternative to that by now :-/

I built a membership/contact database (essentially a custom, lightweight CRM) on Zope/Plone for a couple of NFPs, including a state political party that lasted for about a decade until they recently centralised to Civicrm at the national level. The code still exists (http://sourceforge.net/p/ssplone/code/HEAD/tree/) but I would not recommend resurrecting it for new projects these days — not with all of the nice tech that’s out now.

My PHP is terribly rusty, but I’m available to help out where I can. I’d be much more interested in helping to build a better system in the future though.

3

There isn’t one. I had intended to write one but as you know, time is hard to find.

I have solved items 2 and 3 using a Drupal/CiviCRM instance, and solved item one sufficiently that we can make do in the interim I think.

Several hours of playing around was all I needed.

4

I care about PPAU, but not enough to write PHP again.

For the majority of the site, a static site generator would be cheaper to host than a CRM (and significantly less work to secure).

5

CiviCRM makes sense for:

  • Handling membership renewal
  • Payment gateway integration
  • Auditing membership records
  • Allowing members to update their own details

The handcoded backend I have right now does not support these things at this stage. It has payment gateway support, but only PayPal at this stage.

There’s no frontend to the membership database, it’s all command line. A frontend was begun but took a backseat prior to the election and that’s where it stayed. I simply don’t have time to do anything but off-the-shelf it up in the meantime.

If you wanted to help write up a custom membership database management utility to the specifications that we’d desire in a system, that’d be excellent, but in the meantime we need something we can have working by mid-September at the latest.

I would be happy to migrate away from it as soon as we migrate to it though. I dread having to go back to it :expressionless:

1 Like
6

So who of you will have a Skype/IRC/Meatspace meeting to bash out a specification for this so that someone can work on it if they have time?