Benefits of using CiviCRM for Drupal based websites

Having a huge list of appointments, meetings, and conferences is always hard to handle. Do you want to put an end to this issue by scheduling your valuable appointments, meetings, and get-togethers in a hassle-free way? Here is the effective tool called CiviCRM helps to record and organize your important conferences, events, group activities in a structured way. Above all, you can access them wherever you’re, if they are integrated with the Drupal websites. Let us have a detailed information of Drupal based websites and the benefits of using CiviCRM in them.

Before going deeply into CiviCRM, first let us know what CMS and CRM are?

CRM and CMS

• CMS – Content Management System

CMS is an efficient system helps in creating, organizing and managing the website contents effectively in a structured way.

There are three most popular open source CMS. They are:

• Drupal
• Joomla
• WordPress

CRM – Contact Relationship Management System

CRM is same as your personal contacts book with some enhanced features associated with it.

What is CiviCRM?

Do you want to keep track of all the important official or personal conversations and interactions??? You can simply carry out this vital task through your websites to manage your engagements and memberships.

CiviCRM is web-based open or free source software. As its name implies, this software can be used, shared, downloaded or installed at free of cost. This software grants complete freedom to share out the original source code to all any of the employee or a person in an organization. The source code can be viewed and modified.

CiviCRM is a modular system and always works with CMS tool, as both the software tools are open source. CiviCRM’s core keeps track of contacts and groups; activities, relationships, tags and permissions. There are 9 components of CiviCRM.

They are:

1. CiviContribute – keep track of contributors
2. CiviEvent – keep track of events
3. CiviMember – keep track of member lists
4. CiviCase – keep track of cases
5. CiviGrant – keep track of grants
6. CiviCampaign – keep track of campaigns
7. CiviPetition – keep track of petitions
8. CiviMail – keep track of bulk mailings
9. CiviReport – keep track of reports

What is Drupal?

Drupal is one among the three most popular open source content management systems. Drupal is back-end framework with pre-built manuscripts. Presently, millions of internet sites are using pre-built manuscripts to grab the attention of new users to have quality traffic for their sites. These pre-built scripts will give you the entire configuration you need for your website. Then, you can customize your website by simply embracing your quality content, personalized pictures, and styles in it.

Why Drupal, not WordPress or Joomla?

Highly customized websites always entails complex content organization and scalability.This results in producing the advanced sites. Drupal is the most friendly and powerful tool capable of categorizing and organizing complex content with its robust and potent taxonomy. Most of the online stores and community platforms nowadays encompass multiple users. Those sites require complex content organization. Hence, developer-friendly tool Drupal is used.

WordPress is user-friendly and it is ideal for creating simple web-sites with partial design options. As it lacks content management capability, this is often targeted by hackers.

Joomla allows you to develop a site with complex content and structure flexibility. It lacks SEO capability and at the same time it is not easy and intuitive.

CiviCRM Integration with CMS or Drupal

Being a free or open source software integrates with CMS (WordPress, Joomla and Drupal) to bring in a set of useful possibilities to the websites in which they’re being used. This helps the users of the websites to carry out many activities on their own. The users can request for email updates, renew their memberships, sign up new events, share the data, edit and modify the data and so on.

Benefits of using CiviCRM in Drupal-based Websites

Drupal being a developer community contains a lot of modules which goes in hands with CiviCRM. CiviCRM and its components keep track of the contacts, member lists, relationships, activities, groups, events, tags and permissions, petitions, grants, contributors, cases, campaigns, reports, and bulk mailings in the Drupal-based websites.

Benefits of using CiviCRM in Drupal-based websites are listed below:

• Expands your website’s operating capabilities.
• Scalability and Security
• Views: display website content.

CiviCRM integrates with Drupal Views and allows CiviCRM data to be shown on your website. One can create CRMData using views in structure section which is located in Drupal Administrative menu

• Calendar Module: displays calendars on your website
• Webform Module: offers extensive options in form submission.
• Organic Groups CiviCRM module: after integration of Drupal Users with CiviCRM, the Drupal group can be used for mailings, tracking address information, tracking activities or anything else normally done with CiviCRM contacts.
• CiviGroup Roles Sync module: allows Drupal Websites’ administrators to update their user experience for donors and staff.
• CiviMember Roles Sync module: allows Drupal Websites’ administrators to update their user experience for organization members.

Stop worrying in handling the bulk of contacts and records!!! Create an effective and powerful planner cum organizer and pre-built website to efficiently handle your private conversations safely using Drupal integrated with CiviCRM!!!