As fledgling users of Drupal, we soon discovered that Drupal has a big brother: CivicSpace. CivicSpace is like Drupal on steroids...it's the Drupal core packaged with several modules, all designed to integrate well with each other.
In the beginning, we figured this wasn't necessary...it sounded bloated, and we assumed we could just install modules as needed. However, we quickly found that this wasn't entirely correct, in at least one major area: CRM.
CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. This could mean anything from the basic management of a mailing list for your site visitors to a Google Map showing their locations, and everything in between. CivicSpace offers this functionality via a module that runs CiviCRM...a component that also exists as a standalone product, and as a product integrated with Mambo, one of Drupal's major competitors.
We thought it would be a good idea to get a feel for CiviCRM, so I decided to try installing it as a module on one of our existing Drupal installations. However, installing CiviCRM onto an existing Drupal site proved impossible. I spent a while trying to figure it out, and then turned to several Drupal experts for advice, and was told unanimously to install CivicSpace instead of Drupal.
CivicSpace, you see, has CiviCRM built-in, and it's configured and installed automatically as part of the CivicSpace setup. Since I didn't want to waste a lot of time figuring out why my install on top of Drupal wasn't working, this seemed like the best approach to take.
