Posted by aaron1234nz on November 1, 2007 at 10:20pm
I am about to embark, in the next week or so, on a proof-of-concept connecting Drupal to iMIS. Initially I will focus on integrating Drupal authentication with iMIS, and retrieving customer data into a web form.
If anyone has any words of wisdom before I start this, I am all ears.
Comments
Also interested
Hi all,
I've been approached to integrate iMIS with Drupal and I came across your group. I'd just like to register my interest in this project and if I can contribute at all I will. I may also be able to contribute funds to help development, or contract someone to write the modules. I'll wait to see if anything develops but contact me if you are interested in being contracted to write the modules required.
Cheers,
Tanc
Progress to date
I have broken down the project into a set of modules (in much the same way as the ecommerce module does). I am working on a core/logon module, committees, customers, and events. I have found the integration pretty easy so far. I am still very much (slowly) working on the code and none of it is completely functional yet. The events section is proving to be a bit challenging though, and I dare say that the ecommerce will be a handful also.
Basically my design philosophy was to create a seperatation between drupal and imis so one can be disconnected from the other for a period of time then then resync when they are able. I have done this by using cron jobs to 'push' data back to imis (via web service) from drupal and also to ask imis for new data (if there is any). I plan to create the webservices using ibo, which drupal will talk to. I have played around with talking to ibo with php, but we may end up writing the services in .net or something like that.
My work has not made the final decision to go with Drupal yet, so until then development will be slow.
iMIS/Drupal Authentication
Hi Team,
We will begin work in early April (2008) to enable Drupal to authenticate against users/accounts in iMIS. We'd be interested in collaborating with any others who have already started this work and/or to discuss opportunities for collaboration and perhaps sponsorship to release the work as a Drupal module. Please consider contacting me if you're interested.
Thanks,
Chris
Chris Steins
Urban Insight - www.urbaninsight.com
Planetizen - www.planetizen.com
Drupal chosen as CMS to intergrate with imis
Fantastic news Chris!!
My company has made the call that Drupal is the CMS that we are going to use for our websites.
Our development plan is to start the integration now and in the next few months complete the integration for authentication, user profiles, product sales, and event registration.
We are really keen to collaborate on the integration.
My intension is to create a wiki page in the next few days with technical details on how I think the integration would best be done, then open it up for comment.
Move to Drupal
We are in the planning phase of a sight redesign. The non-profit that I work for has been using iMIS for 3 years now. I was excited to find a community that was discussing Drupal/iMIS. A business associate suggested Drupal. I was excited to see a community that was discussing Drupal/iMIS, it has made the decision in the drupal direction looking very promising.
Would you share more with me about what you have been able to accomplish for the product sales and event registration processes?
Have you used the iMIS_Authentication module?
Any feed back or other published Drupal/iMIS modules that you are aware of or willing to share with me would be greatly appreciated.
How did the authentication module go?
I see this group has grown a bit stale. But I was curious to see how you solved the authentication, I'm working for an institute that is trying to integrate Drupal and iMIS and iMIS authentication for Drupal is one of our first goals.
The iMIS integration project
The iMIS integration project I've been involved with has been very successful and has been live for over 12 month.
What we have achieved:
* User authentication from iMIS (when a user logs in iMIS is queried)
* User can update their details. This includes data you would find in the iMIS Name table, Name_Address table as well as user defined tables in iMIS.
* Users can view billing items (current and outstanding)
* Users can pay for their billing items online
* Event registration. This includes some special logic to run multi-day multi-stream events. Pricing is determined by the users member type and is quoted to the user with realtime ajax quotes from iMIS.
* Product purchase. This includes per-user price quotes, live ajax shipping quotes from iMIS, and anonymous purchasing.
* Course registration. We have integrated iMIS with Moodle (learning managment system) via Drupal. Course enrolments are realtime and require no staff interaction
* Integration with Webforms - data is submitted to user defined windows in iMIS
* Custom reporting (this is done iMIS side) to help staff manage activity on the website.
* Daily sychronisation between iMIS and Drupal
* Organic groups integration
* Very complex permission system which allows fine grain control over the entire site (permissions are controled by iMIS)
* Multi-site/microsite - Many content editors who have access to view/edit sections.
Currently we are running Drupal 5. The code is a bit specialised to us. I would be interested in upgrading this code/generalizing/releasing it to Drupal 6 if there is demand and funding available.
We do not use the iMIS Authentication module. Instead we use a package developed by metisc (an Australian-based company)
Our live sites are vetspace.org.nz and cve.edu.au
Very Much Interested
We may be interested in bringing some of this code up to drupal 6 and 7. We are working on a Drupal 7 - iMIS integration for the American Library Association. Our thinking is to have a drupal website at the center of the system consuming imis, moodle, other drupal installs, sympa etc webservices and providing a "user profile" read webservice to the other applications. The users would have a dashboard of sort using the drupal UI to edit user related data. The dashboard forms would be populated via the read webservice. On submission, data would be pushed to imis, sympa, moodle, etc via their native webservices and sql when webservices weren't available.
We would likely rely heavily on the feeds and services modules.
Can you summarize the architecture and how modular the feature sets are including how drupal, imis, and moodle exchange data? Or upload the code. This would give us a sense of how appropriate the code base is for what we are doing.
www.johnbarclay.com
progress?
How's progress on getting to D6?
I have to integrate a Drupal site to iMIS with Metisc access in between. Do you have any tips?