How to Integrate your Drupal Website with CiviCRM

Continuing in our series of integrating CRMs with Drupal, we're now going to take a look at CiviCRM, an open-source, web-based CRM aimed at charities and non-profits which integrates closely with Drupal, Joomla and WordPress.

On a first look, it appears as another Drupal module and is downloaded and enabled in much the same way. However, it's really an external system that sits within Drupal. Often this leads to confusion as it doesn't behave and act in the same way as normal Drupal modules. It also doesn't work well with Drupal's theming layer and provides its own Smarty based templating engine.

Out of the box, CiviCRM comes with a lot of features, including nice deduping contacts functionality and a mail merge. Other features include:

• Contact management
• Event forms and registration management
• Donation forms
• Mailing lists
• Petitions
• Membership management

While aimed at charities and non-profit organisations, it can be customised for commercial applications. However, it is quite a large or weighty program with all the functionality it provides and we've seen a considerable negative performance impact on sites using it.

Due to its close integration with the Drupal platform, it is not too complicated to extend it to integrate with other Drupal modules, such as Webform, Ubercart and Entities and I actually wrote the Drupal Commerce CiviCRM integration module. It provides a fair number of CiviCRM hooks and an API to facilitate this sort of integration.

We've used CiviCRM on a number of client sites, including a bi-lingual English-Irish one, where we had to translate a number of the CiviCRM interface strings into Irish and which resulted in me becoming the maintainer of the CiviCRM Irish translation! 

However, our experiences using CiviCM generally haven't been that good. We've found it difficult to maintain, upgrade and customise, which combined with the website performance penalty, has resulted in us switching to Drupal's fully native RedHen CRM instead. I'll be covering RedHen in more detail in a later blog post in this series.

Why not get in contact with us to discuss how we can integrate your CRM and website?