Automatically Create a Drupal User After a CiviCRM Contact is Created

One feature that has been lacking in CiviCRM is the ability to create a Drupal user when a contact is NOT created via the new Drupal user form or a CiviCRM profile form. Luckily Skvare has developed a custom extension to solve this problem. CiviCRM administrators will often create contacts manually in CiviCRM or import new contacts that will need to log into the site. To do this now, administrators will need to go to each contact and choose “Create CMS User” from the contact’s actions menu. After the contact has been created, the admins need to reach out to the contact and ask that they reset

Migrating your site from Wordpress to Drupal

Wordpress (WP) can be an easy to use open-source content management system (CMS) for simple websites. However Wordpress relies heavily on 3rd party plug-ins to extend its basic functionality. Since plug-ins are created by different developers in the community, it can be difficult for content creators to figure out where to make changes. There may be some plug-ins that provide additional options within WP core’s “posts” or they may have to search through each of the plug-ins to make the changes. It is not a scalable solution if your website is not simple. Drupal is another open-source content

Using Layout Builder to Construct Awesome Event Pages

In our last blog in this series we will be taking the various features and pieces we’ve worked on using the CiviCRM Entity module, and assemble them using the Drupal 8 core theme module, the Layout Builder. Our goal will be to create an attractive event information page (a useful feature for our clients here at Skvare) featuring: Our CiviCRM Support Your JLA event and Slick image slideshow from our previous blog A map to show the event location A list of registered participants Several useful graphs for our event managers So let's gather our ingredients! To show our list of registered

Customizing Event Pages with Media

Drupal 8 brings several major upgrades to the popular CMS, including the new core media module. The media library allows you to upload, manage, and reuse media (images, audio, video, and files) throughout your site, using a modern, user-friendly interface. As a core module, it also completely integrates with: Image styles Responsive image styles As of version 8.8, the CKEditor! And a host of popular contributed modules such as focal point, retina images, and photoswipe How can I use these with my CiviCRM entities, such as events? These rich media features are just some of the modern Drupal 8

Contributions and Reports within Views

Reports are an incredibly powerful tool used to develop future forecasts, marketing plans, guide budget planning and improve decision-making. In CiviCRM, one of the most important applications for reporting is in tracking and assessing the various kinds of contributions. Today we will take a look at how to create reports using CiviCRM data within views, a popular use-case for our clients at Skvare. We will then add a chart display using the Charts module for a contribution report to convert it from raw data into easy-to-understand, consumable information with views in Drupal 8. This will be ideal for presenting to constituents, board members, financial partners, and other stakeholders. We will then create a block and place it directly on a relevant page, taking advantage of the ubiquitous block system to easily place our report anywhere we want on our website. So let’s get started! For our example, let’s say we’re holding an event for our “Support your JLA” initiative, and had our superhero contacts register for the event. First, we’ll create our event and contribution options within CiviCRM.

Interactive Maps with CiviCRM Addresses

Showing locations on maps is an important feature for many modern websites. At Skvare, we specialize in building websites using open source Drupal and CiviCRM systems. So naturally, being able to use CiviCRM addresses within Drupal pages is a feature we are often asked to develop. Enter the CiviCRM Entity Leaflet submodule for Drupal 8/9. This new addition allows users to access and display their contacts’ address locations, geocoded using the geocoder extension, in fully customizable and easy to use Leaflet-based maps. Neat! How do I configure my contacts? To demonstrate, we’re going to use the superhero contacts we created last time in our CiviCRM Contacts in Drupal 8 blog. And we’re going to enable the geocoder extension, which will allow CiviCRM to automatically convert and record our addresses into latitude and longitude coordinates that online mapping systems use. Quickly resaving our contacts will run the geocoder, and we’ll see a new icon “Map” appear next to our addresses, signifying that the latitude and longitude have been recorded.

CiviCRM Contacts in Drupal 8

Today we are going to explore a common use case for how CiviCRM contacts can integrate with Drupal users using the CiviCRM Entity module. Managing contacts can be a daunting task for organizations, including many of our clients here at Skvare. With needs that include membership subscriptions, group emails, accepting donations, relationships to other contacts and organizations, and more - thankfully, CiviCRM answers each of these in a straightforward and user-friendly way. And by pairing with Drupal we enable custom user profiles, and any combination of contact-content referencing, while making use of advanced media features and display options. So before we dive in, how do we connect CiviCRM contacts and Drupal users? Please note that all synced contacts are for “Individual” contact types and subtypes within CiviCRM. Organizations (and Households) are thought of as “person-less” contacts. When a new user is registered in Drupal, through either a standard Drupal registration form or a CiviCRM-enabled profile webform, a contact is automatically created in CiviCRM with the same contact information and address.

Unleashing the CiviCRM Entity Module in Drupal 8

We are excited to announce a new blog and webinar series on the CiviCRM Entity module, demonstrating practical applications of CiviCRM integration with Drupal. Proudly presented and hosted by Skvare, we will cover an initial 8 topics - highlighting key features and use cases of this powerful tool. We’ve included the first five topics below, and will update with additional topics soon: (May 25) - CiviCRM Contacts in Drupal 8 (June 1) - Interactive Maps with CiviCRM Addresses (June 8) - Contributions and Reports within Views (June 15) - Customizing Event Pages with Media (June 22) - Using Layout Builder to Contruct Awesome Event Pages After introducing a new topic with each blog, we will hold an open webinar with a live demonstration of the feature followed by time set aside for a Q&A with one of our lead developers and the CiviCRM Entity module maintainer, Mark Hanna. Stay tuned for the schedule to be announced with dates for these webinars. We will also take suggestions for additional CiviCRM and Drupal integration topics and discussions! A brief introduction to the CiviCRM Entity module... Before we get ahead of ourselves, let’s talk a little about what the CiviCRM Entity module is and how it fits in, providing a robust integration tool for the CRM/CMS ecosystem. Let’s take a quick look at the two major players here, CiviCRM and Drupal.

CiviCRM How To: Importing Contacts, Part 3

Part 3: Dealing with Errors (or: Causing Errors on Purpose) This guide will help you with two situations: You've almost completed your CiviCRM contact import, but you've gotten an error message that says "CiviCRM has detected invalid data or formatting errors." You are preparing your import file and you're not sure what values to use for some CiviCRM fields. First, let's start by looking at what CiviCRM does when it runs into an error during a contact import. What an Import Error Looks Like Here's an import file -- a contact spreadsheet, almost exactly like the one from Part 1, except this

CiviCRM How To: Importing Contacts, Part 2

Do you have a set of contact data that is outside your CiviCRM database, which you need to get into your CiviCRM database? In this how-to guide, we'll go through the process of importing a set of contacts into CiviCRM. You can use CiviCRM's import functionality to add new contacts to your system, add or update details on contacts that you already have in your CiviCRM database, or do both at the same time! Click here for the official CiviCRM documentation on contact imports. In addition to the contact import, CiviCRM also gives you separate processes for importing contributions, memberships