Book Image

CiviCRM Cookbook

Book Image

CiviCRM Cookbook

Overview of this book

CiviCRM is a web-based, open source, Constituent Relationship Management (CRM) software geared toward meeting the needs of non-profit and other civic-sector organizations.Organizations realize their mission via CiviCRM through contact management, fundraising, event management, member management, mass e-mail marketing, peer-to-peer campaigns, case management, and much more.CiviCRM is localized in over 20 languages including: Chinese (Taiwan, China), Dutch, English (Australia, Canada, U.S., UK), French (France, Canada), German, Italian, Japanese, Russian, and Swedish.CiviCRM Cookbook will enhance your CiviCRM skills. It has recipes to help you use CiviCRM more efficiently, integrate it with CMSs, and also develop CiviCRM.This book begins with recipes that help save time and effort with CiviCRM. This is followed by recipes for organizing data more efficiently and managing profiles.Then you will learn authentication and authorization and managing communication with contacts.Then you will be guided on using the searching feature and preparing reports. We will then talk about integrating Drupal and CiviCRM. You will also be taught to manage events effectively. Finally, learn about CiviCampaign, Civimember, and developing CiviCRM.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
CiviCRM Cookbook
Credits
Foreword
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Adding the external identifier to full-text searching


Many CiviCRM installations contain legacy data that has different unique identifiers than CiviCRM's contact ID. For example, you might have a membership system that identifies contacts with a membership number. Your staff will be used to using this identifier to locate data quickly. CiviCRM provides the external identifier field to hold this information and you can continue to use it to find your contacts.

CiviCRM also has a custom full-text search that allows you to search multiple contact fields at the same time. It is available as a block in Drupal. Unfortunately the custom search does not include the external identifier as a searchable field.

How to do it…

We will navigate to and open up the custom search PHP file and make a small edit to include the external identifier field in searches.

  1. Make sure that the Full-text Search block is visible in Drupal:

  2. Navigate to /sites/all/modules/civicrm/CRM/Contact/Form/Search/Custom/FullText.php.

  3. Find...