Session Abstract, Resources and Expected Outcomes
Session Abstract
CiviCRM is an open source, internationalized, constituent relationship management (CRM) application, designed specifically to meet the needs of advocacy, non-profit and non-governmental organizations. CiviCRM is licensed under the AGPL, and comes with well-defined open APIs.
The purpose of this session is to introduce the APIs to the Drupal development community so that Drupal developers can start integrating CiviCRM objects such as contacts, profiles, relationships, groups and activity history into their modules.
CiviCRM is currently integrated with the e-commerce, event finder, location, mass mailer, organic groups, user, and volunteer modules. We will look at how to write modules to detect if CiviCRM is running, and use code examples to illustrate how developers can use CiviCRM's APIs to add the benefits of a structured CRM repository to their modules. Several individuals will be presenting integration examples, including brief code walk-throughs and tips.
We will also be soliciting discussion and input from the group on needed enhancements and future directions for CiviCRM API development.
NOTE: This is a presentation, not a moderated session. However, we will keep it informal and leave plenty of time for Q & A and discussion.
Resources
The Public APIs section of the CiviCRM wiki is currently the best resource for learning about available APIs. There is a growing set of code snippets in this section as well as a page of links to modules which use the APIs.
Outcomes
- Attendees should leave with a better idea of the core CiviCRM entities, available APIs and examples of how those APIs can be used to allow modules to share a structured integrated data store of contact and contact interaction data.
- Ideas generated for improving and extending CiviCRM APIs and API architecture and deepening the opportunities for integration with existing Drupal features.
- More full examples and code snippets generated and posted as resources for new implementors.