Joe Hudson Log

This is the log of OSE related work done by Joe Hudson.

30th Sept

Evaluated CiviCRM Personal Campaigns extension for creation of OSE microfunding share and recognition pages.

My conclusion after creating a campaign page and reading through the extension documentation is that it would take at least as much work to adapt this Personal Campaigns extension to the needs of this project as to built the required functionality out of other Drupal modules; with the later being preferable due to it being more in harmony with the Drupal way of doing things (and thus easier to maintain with Drupal updates).

The reasons for this view are:

• Inflexible structure of Campaign pages, with the focus on reaching a target sum, no video field, campaign start and end dates, etc.
• Complexity of Campaign forms, unnecessary details that would overwhelm a lot of people.
• Modifying Campaign page structure and elements would involve modifying the CiviCRM extension, something which many fewer people will have skills in, compared to regular Drupal module development. (New data fields can be added through the interface, but these are intended as attributes of individuals, rather than recognition page elements, such as videos.)
• The features which it provides are readily available in a combination of popular Drupal 7 modules: Invite, User Relationships, Lm_paypal.

I propose starting by creating a custom content type using CCK node fields, with a custom module to integrate existing community contributed modules which provide the main blocks of functionality. I believe the time needed to create a bare bones functional solution, which users can feel confident using, would be less than that required with the Personal Campaigns approach. CiviCRM would still be used for storing the user/fan specific data.

If there is a volunteer who is an expert CiviCRM developer, they may wish to differ with what I've written above. Otherwise I suggest not using the Personal Campaign extension for a quick and dirty implementation.

Regarding video integration, there is the Media: Youtube module which appears to allow uploaded videos to be saved on youtube and then automatically embedded on a page.

Unless there are objections I will start on the above plan immediately.