Playing Nice in the Drupal Sandbox with RedHen

ThinkShout recently release a native Drupal CRM called RedHen whose overall architecture consists of a set of minimalistic building blocks that developers and site builders can use to develop solutions tailored to specific use cases. To this end, we struggled on the right balance between leveraging contributed modules and writing custom code. In some cases, using contributed code would be less upfront work, but be more prescriptive in the resulting feature set than we were comfortable with. At the same time, we certainly didn't want to develop a nasty case of NIH, alienate the community, or not take advantage of the many great available contributions.

This talk will go over the decisions that we made and modules we did end up depending on, get a bit technical in reviewing the RedHen architecture, and touch on the big picture of how to find a good balance between contributed and custom code.