The Story of Successful Drupal Integrations in 3 Acts

Drupal's scalable and flexible architecture make it an ideal platform for not just custom development, but sophisticated integrations with other tools and services. Those integrations can be even more successful when done in partnership with the service providers themselves. In this session, we'll explore 3 Drupal integrations that have all taken a different path to success.

1. MailChimp and Mandrill: The MailChimp module started as a classic "scratch your own itch" story. ThinkShout's founder Lev had a side venture built on Drupal that needed MailChimp integration, which didn't exist at the time. So he built it. It became quite popular, and too much for him to maintain on the side. So he reached out to MailChimp, which, to its everlasting credit, had the vision to invest in an open source integration, a very novel concept at the time. Since then, ThinkShout and MailChimp have partnered on the popular integration, growing its user base to over 24k installs.

2. iATS Payments: The iATS integration was born out of a shared interest in serving the same group of clients, nonprofits and other mission-driven organizations. iATS Payments has long been the leading payment processor dedicated to the nonprofit community, which is ThinkShout’s area of expertise. As we built websites with payment processing needs for features such as paid event registrations and donations, we heard over and over again that our clients wanted to use the iATS payment gateway, which didn't have a Drupal plugin for Drupal Commerce or Ubercart. So we reached out to iATS Payments and embarked on a partnership resulting in the Commerce iATS module, used by dozens of large nonprofits to power their commercial needs.

3. Salesforce: Salesforce has emerged as the leading CRM for nonprofits, in addition to its dominance in the private sector. Its success lies, in part, on its robust API and open data policy. It's by far the easiest enterprise caliber CRM to build robust integrations with. ThinkShout built the native Drupal CRM, RedHen, as a standalone for small to midsize organizations. For larger clients, though, it just isn't enough and they require a third party CRM. For these use cases, we rewrote the Salesforce Suite to a provide a powerful bi-directional connection between any objects in the two systems, and its success speaks for itself.

The common thread for these integrations is to build flexible integrations than can be applied across a wide range of use cases. Having the support of the service providers is a huge bonus, but not required.