Introduction

Building a feature using CRM Core profile is easy. In this demo we will demonstrate the step-by-step instruction on how to do it. Please note this is a follow up and more in-depth guide to http://www.trellon.com/content/blog/building-crm-core-feature.

What are we building

In this demo we will be building an “online petition” feature that allows a website to:

1. Create an online petition for a particular cause.
2. Collect information from petition signers such as name, email, city and state.
3. Run a report to see how many people have signed the petition and optionally export the data to a spreadsheet.
4. Display a counter to show how many people have signed a specific petition.

CRM Core is a tool for managing contact information within a Drupal website. It was designed to act as a platform, where developers can add small, useful applications on top of the core components to handle specific use-cases. It was also designed to be highly interoperable with Drupal so that people without any specialized programming knowledge could work with it.

CRM Core was launched a little over a year ago, and one of the most common questions we encounter is about creating a new feature to interact with the platform. Creating a CRM Core feature should not be a huge hurdle for anyone with a basic knowledge of how to work with Drupal. The process is pretty simple and should require minimal amounts of code; in fact, it's possible to create them without writing any code at all.

This blog post presents a step-by-step guide to creating CRM Core features within Drupal. It will demonstrate how someone can set up a site to collect information about contacts, create useful interfaces for interacting with the information that is collected, and build forms for collecting this information from the public. It also outlines how to create portable features for CRM Core that can be used across multiple sites, allowing people to build their own CRM systems to serve niche needs.

This exercise can be carried out by anyone with a fresh copy of Drupal, and can be completed in as little as 30 minutes. We have included sample code demonstrating all of the points in this exercise, in case you get stuck at any point or just wish to jump to the end. Read More >>>