Working group

One upshot of the CiviCRM BoF at DrupalCon DC '09 was the discovery of some common interest in developing basic, lightweight CRM functionality from existing Drupal modules and new modules adhering to Drupal architectural patterns. The intention would not necessarily be to duplicate existing third-party software like CiviCRM and Salesforce, but to create a simpler option, more closely integrated into Drupal CMS, for smaller-scale CRM applications that don't require the complexity of a dedicated CRM platform.

Big companies have achieved serious productivity gains through the deployment of ERP systems (such as SAP) that integrate sales, production, purchasing, etc. into so-called ERP systems http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise_resource_planning. This made it possible to gather more data and actually use that data for more efficient forecasting, to set up warning systems for management to prevent impeding catastrophe, etc. Without ERP, there would be no just in time manufacturing and global supply chains would still be a bureaucratic nightmare.

This is a working group for those involved in the development and extension of Drupal's Next Generation database abstraction layer, including the Schema API and the development of new database drivers.

Please remember to read the documentation for the Database API. It will likely be helpful to review the PDO documentation as well.

In this group we should formulate and discuss the required and optional features for Spreadsheets as nodes in Drupal. I have started a Spreadsheet module and will upload it once I have .csv import working (as an obvious requirement for any Spreadsheet module).

All are welcome to join this group, programmers, users, developers, etc... and give me their two cents as to what is required for a Spreadsheet module in Drupal.

Also, I would like to try and find some other developers to collaborate with so that our module ends up being as good as possible.

Integrating Drupal with Customer Relationship Management solutions such as Salesforce, SugarCRM, [Tiger], etc.

Drupal is such a good opportunity for students, and students are such a good opportunity for the drupal community and for Drupal firms.

So how can we organize such a good collaboration ?

The Token module for Drupal 4.7 and 5 exposes simple text substitution tokens like [title] and [user-name], for use in path generation, mass mailings, and many other situation where admins want to set up text replacement patterns without using PHP snippets. Other modules can expose their own domain-specific replacement tokens (like information about a purchase, or an organic group that a user is a member of) and use Token's centralized replace() function to replace token occurrences in any piece of text.

In August of 2006, I wrote a blog post about Drupal for Documents. In that post I outlined some of the modules that could be used together to build a document management system in Drupal.

This group is for the discussion of best practices for storing files in Drupal, consideration of improvements and modules that could help improve the process, and for other document related issues in Drupal.

The aim of this group is to design and implement a Links Exchange engine which is very useful for promoting your web site (e.g. SEO). It is planned to use Link Package module as an API module.

Please, feel free to participate into this group if you want to take part in this engine development or discussion.

I would like to add that link exchange engine will be an extremely great addition to the Drupal. At the moment there is no such solution in Drupal, so people have to use 3d party components and integrate with them which is bad.

Several months ago, I was tasked with creating some way to assign roles to users in groups. I installed the og roles module. What I discovered was that this module simply assigned a role to a user, not to a user in a particular group. I realized what I needed was a way to assign a role to a user in a way so that the user would only have this role in this particular group, not sitewide and certainly not in all groups. To do this, I needed to understand Drupal permissions and Access Control worked. My progress on this particular task is here: http://drupal.org/node/87679