May4 Drupal User's Group: How custom is too custom? Tips for coding (and when not to)

This month we are joined by Brock Fanning with the College of Arts and Humanities.

Title: How custom is too custom? Tips for coding (and when not to).

This presentation is about making the call between writing custom code and using contributed modules. There will be no code snippets; it is more of a high-level look at Drupal customization and its pros and cons.

The material will be most useful to developers and project managers. This presentation will address questions like:

• When is custom code appropriate?
• When should contrib solutions be investigated, and when are they overkill?
• Is there an acceptable way to hack Drupal?
• Given a feature request, how do I choose a path?
• What are common tasks that usually end up requiring custom code?
• What are some contrib modules that allow for customization without code?
• What are some best practices for maintaining custom code?
• What are the general categories of custom code, and how do I approach them?
• What should developers say to managers when they ask for stuff?
• What should managers ask developers when asking for stuff?