CiviCRM runs fine in standalone mode, so it doesn't strictly require Drupal or Joomla.
If you're looking for a dot-org CRM / membership solution, it's highly likely to fill all the gaps nicely. The community is very supportive and active (forums and IRC are good places to ask questions), and the core team are really responsive. Drupal + CiviCRM bridges both CRM / CMS nicely and if you're looking to integrate the membership signup and regular website to drive campaigns, it's a good pairing. It seems (from what I see in the community) that Drupal is the more full-featured base to build CiviCRM on top of. We've got hosted customers happily using it on Joomla too, but I'm not as familiar with that platform. The fact that CiviCRM supports multiple CMS / user frameworks doesn't necessarily impact performance or functionality. Likewise, Drupal's support for multiple DB backends doesn't incur a performance or functional penalty - it's just abstracted. I'd agree with Dave's questions about the size of the codebase you'll be taking on - while the performance is fine, the size of the codebase (~45MB!) will mean it's quite a bit to soak in if you want to get hacking. My personal experience (someone highly familiar with Drupal) has been that building on Drupal and talking to CiviCRM via their API has been simpler than building on CiviCRM directly (and thus working with Smarty, HTML_QuickForm, and Dojo). HTH -- NZ PHP Users Group: http://groups.google.com/group/nzphpug To post, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe, send email to [email protected]
