CiviCRM comes with a set of components out of the box and a large number of extensions that provide extra functionality.
Components #
CiviCRM consists of these components after installation:
- CiviContribute – deals with all incoming payments
- CiviEvent – primarily deals with event registrations and communication as well as participation fees and payment
- CiviMember – allows membership management, including payments
- CiviMail – enables creation and sending of newsletters and bulkmail
- CiviCase – used for Case Management and documents case types, roles / contats involved with a case, actions in the context of a case
- CiviCampaign – for the documentation of any form of campaigns you might run
- CiviReport – provides default reports on all CiviCRM components
Extensions #
Extensions are sometimes small and sometimes big additions to CiviCRM functionality. There are many of them. Some are available for download through Gitlab/hub. Others can be approached in CiviCRM itself through the menu Administer/System Settings/Extensions or can be found and read about on the CiviCRM website. Any CiviCRM administrator can switch them on or off.
We’re listing a number of them here that we use in some or all of the video’s on this site:
- Mosaico – a newsletter creator that provides similar functionality to that of Mailchimp; drag ‘n drop boxes, images, add text and you are good to go
- Dataprocessor – extension that enables the creation of lists, search screens, API’s to show specific data on a website, create tokens with, create .csv or spreadsheet exports, etc. The dataprocessor itself has a number of extensions that add functionality to it as well
- Action Provider – add Actions menu to results in Dataprocessor
- Display the groups in the contact summary – provides functionality to edit the summary tab layout of each contacttype as well as what tabs are shown or not for each contacttype
- Form Processor – the formprocessor deals with webform submissions (though it can do other stuff too) into CiviCRM. It puts incoming data in the right place and applies your business logic to data coming in. So, for instance it defines what confirmation emails are to be sent in specific situations after a donation has been made
- Omnipay Multiprocessor Support – extension that can handle a large of payment processors and document payments done through them in CiviCRM. We used it for the Mollie payment processor in the videos on this site
- SEPA Direct Debit – for European organisations that want to allow direct debit constructions for donations, membership payments or event fees
- CiviRules – this extension enables creation of business rules that can be run against your data. For instance: any donor that donates more than x per year, goes into the Gold Donors Group.
- Recent Items Menu – adds a menu item to the main CiviCRM menu showing the 20 most recent items you viewed in CiviCRM, which you can then quickly go back to
- Relationship Block – enables adding a selection of relationship types to the summary tab of a contact
These are extensions that we use in nearly all CiviCRM installs. There are more that we use regularly. Any others that were used in any of the video’s will be described there.
