ProcessWire and CiviCRM

[Alicia]

Hi there! I just started using PW about a week ago and I'm loving it so far -- it's so much more powerful and flexible than Wordpress, where I came from. I don't think I'll ever go back to Wordpress unless I'm actually making a blog.

I'm building a website for a sports league nonprofit, and the time has really come for a CRM / member management solution, because we have about 150 teams and each team has around 20 individual members each. We're looking into Salesforce, which I know can integrate with PW, but it has a lot of features we don't really need and doesn't seem like a perfect fit, so I'm looking into CiviCRM as well.

Has anyone used CiviCRM with PW? I know they have a version that integrates with Wordpress, and does anyone have any idea how hard it would be to tailor to work with PW? I'm on the beginner end of the intermediate spectrum with PHP; I've built tons of Wordpress templates with a lot of customization, though I trip up a bit with object-oriented PHP. I have a lot of time to learn and improve, though!

Thanks in advance! 

[kongondo]

Hi Alicia,

Welcome to ProcessWire! I haven't used CiviCRM before so cannot answer on that front. Just wanted to say hi and also let you know PW also has a blog profile (for your future reference)

Edit:

Btw, how much integration are you talking? From the Salesforce with PW thread, I think the advice was to keep the two separate

[Alicia]

Thank you! I've looked at the blog profile a bit and it's a lot to take in, but I'm planning on pulling out parts of it to use for our news area. I did the basic news tutorial and it's a little basic for what we need (we've published around 500 articles in the last two years on our current Wordpress site).

I'm still trying to work out how the CRM / website integration will work. We need a separate CRM to keep track of membership payments, benefits, and requirements, but because we're a sports league we also have some unique needs:

• Keep track of the games each team is playing and use the game data to feed into a complex ranking system (which right now is a mess of a php plugin that our previous web developer made for Wordpress)
• Allowing teams to add or remove players from tournament rosters
• Allowing a logged in team captain to create tournament or game pages on the website and allowing other logged in captains to register their team as attending that tournament

I'm still trying to wrap my mind around the best way to structure all of this, and wondering how much makes sense to do in PW itself, so if anyone has any advice, I'd really appreciate it!

[horst]

 ... (we've published around 500 articles in the last two years on our current Wordpress site). ...

Hi Alicia, welcome to the forums.

maybe this can become usefull: http://processwire.com/talk/topic/3748-cms-critic-now-powered-by-processwire/page-2#entry36867

All that other stuff you are talking about, I don't understand enough of.

[Macrura]

@Alicia,

I am in the process of building something similar (a site with a lot of front-end user management), but am planning on using PW for as much of it as possible.

The problem with using something like CiviCRM is that it's really just another CMS where someone has already defined the business logic. If you do it all in PW, then you have the freedom to model things precisely how you need, without having to 'adapt' to some other pre-defined structure.

On the other hand if CIviCRM provides most of what you need out of the box, then you can save a lot of time by using it, instead of 'rolling your own'; but you might be surprised how easy it could be to build certain things with PW..

If you end up integrating it into Processwire, then looking at how it has been integrated into other CMS might provide some clues;

One other thing to consider is that CiviCRM is known for being somewhat demanding on hardware, and might require a more robust server, whereas in my experience, PW runs great on shared hosting with limited resources, and once you factor in caching (like ProCache) it will probably run circles around most other systems (especially the big 3)

[Alicia]

@horst -- That's a great resource, thanks! I've got it bookmarked.

@Macrura -- Thanks! You inspired me to start writing out the way I'd do the architecture if I did pretty much everything in PW. I think I'm going to try it out and see how it goes. This thread is going to be a great resource. Does your site include any user payments that need to be kept track of? That's one part I think I might have to outsource.

[Macrura]

@Alicia -

I think payments depends on a lot of things, like will those be processed on the server, or by a 3rd party;

I think if it is something simple like a form that accepts some user input, redirects to PayPal for checkout which sends an IPN via cURL etc, that should be doable without too much wok;

if it something where you want to accept payments within the app, you could use something like FoxyCart to handle the payments (you can setup a subdomain on your site for the checkout page), it would depend on the size and amount of monthly transactions...FC only works with the more 'pro' payment processors like PayPal payments pro, or Authorize.net, so it all starts to add up.. But FC does have a XML response that you can process so that after someone pays you would be able to take that info and have the payment reflected in the user's profile.

[ryan]

Shopify is another decent payment solution to integrate with ProcessWire. Shopify is pretty much self running and easy to setup (they host it), but has a feature called post order hooks that you can have ping your defined URLs (in your PW installation) with JSON data about a completed order, etc. This makes it fairly simple to create or modify user accounts or other pages based on the results of a store transaction.