Drupal

Everyone builds the same components, separately: navigation, cards and accessible forms

Every public-sector website needs the same handful of things:

• a navigation people can actually use
• a card, a button, a form that works with a screen reader
• pages that read unmistakably as official

Most organisations pay to build all of it again, from scratch, on every project.

The cost is not only the first build. It shows up again when a component changes and nobody can say which of your sites carries which version, and again when accessibility arrives late as a remediation ticket rather than early as a default. And the sites drift apart until services meant to feel like one government no longer do.

A shared design system converts that repeated spend into a single maintained asset. Designing one is the easy half. The hard half is maintaining it so that the teams downstream can take an update without fear.

What CivicTheme is: a UI Kit, a Drupal theme, modules and a Figma source

CivicTheme(Opens in a new tab/window) is an open-source, component-based design system published by Salsa Digital(Opens in a new tab/window). Its own documentation puts the purpose plainly: it was created "so governments and corporations can rapidly assemble modern, consistent and compliant digital experiences".

4 parts ship, and they stay in step:

• a CMS-agnostic UI Kit of components built with HTML, CSS and JavaScript, browsable in Storybook
• a Drupal(Opens in a new tab/window) theme that connects the content model to those components
• supporting modules, including one that adapts the theme to the federal GovCMS(Opens in a new tab/window) platform
• a Figma design source that carries the same version number as the code, so a designer and a developer are provably looking at the same release

Accessibility sits in the baseline rather than in each agency's budget. The documentation is explicit: "The components have been built and assessed to comply with WCAG accessibility standards 2.1 AA out-of-the-box."

Our part in the work: architecture, release engineering and maintenance since 2021

Salsa Digital publishes CivicTheme, hosts it and runs its community. We wrote its first commit in September 2021 and have provided the engineering behind it ever since:

• architecture of the component system
• development of the components, the theme and the supporting modules
• release engineering, to drupal.org and to npm
• ongoing maintenance as Drupal, PHP and GovCMS move forward

Everything is developed in one repository and published out to the separate ones people install from. Develop together, ship separately: that one decision lets a small team keep a theme, a component library, companion modules and a documentation site moving in step.

Underneath it, the build and continuous integration run on our own open-source project tooling, the same tooling we bring to client platforms. For a client, that reads as inheritance: the build and test discipline behind a public design system arrives with us on your own platform.

Making an update safe to take: visual regression and schema update tests

Components exist in 2 forms, Twig templates and Drupal Single Directory Components, so that Drupal consumers and non-Drupal consumers each get the implementation they need. Keeping 2 versions of every component honest by hand would be untenable, so parity is machine-enforced: tooling synchronises them, and a check command fails the build the moment they drift.

The primary defence is visual. A unit test cannot tell you that a button moved 4 pixels, and teams downstream notice.

So every pull request captures screenshots of the components, publishes a side-by-side comparison and posts the link back into the review conversation where someone will actually read it. The same pipeline does double duty: one comparison catches a visual regression against the released version, the other catches drift between the 2 component implementations.

Then there is the question every organisation actually asks: what happens to our site when we take the update? Because the system ships configuration for content types, fields and site settings, updates are rehearsed against committed database snapshots, both schema-only and schema-with-content, before they reach anyone.

For a team downstream, that is what makes an update routine rather than a project: the change has been rehearsed against a database shaped like yours before it reaches you.

Release rules follow the same instinct: on drupal.org, where a release cannot be deleted, only the development branch is ever pushed.

Where it is now: Drupal 10 and 11, GovCMS, and 4 content profiles

Live and in service. Published on drupal.org and on npm, documented at docs.civictheme.io(Opens in a new tab/window), with the component library and a live demonstration site online.

4 industry content profiles ship alongside a default:

• Corporate
• Government
• Higher Education
• Health

Each is a complete worked example rather than a starter shell, so a team can watch the system do the job before committing to it.

It tracks the platform forward: Drupal 10 and Drupal 11, current PHP, GovCMS support kept current. A steady release cadence has carried it across 4 years, with a pre-release channel so teams can test a release candidate before they take it.

A single maintained design system, 4 industry content profiles, and 4 years of steady releases.

4 years on, we are still the engineering behind it.

For teams rebuilding the same components on every site

Everything on this page is 4 of our services running on one public open-source design system: the architecture of the component system, the development of the components and modules, the DevOps and release engineering that ships them, and the ongoing support and maintenance that keeps all of it current. The same standard applies to our AI-assisted delivery: whatever writes a component, the visual comparison and the schema update tests are what decide it is safe to release.

If you run a government agency, a university, or any organisation with a family of sites that keep drifting apart, this is the shape the engagement takes: a component library that is genuinely shared, accessibility in the baseline rather than in a remediation ticket, and updates rehearsed before they reach your site.

If you are weighing up CivicTheme for your next site, or you already run it and want taking an update to be routine, tell us which sites you are trying to keep in step.

The 2 costs nobody puts on the budget: setup and drift

Ask a team that runs more than 1 Drupal(Opens in a new tab/window) site where its time goes, and 2 answers come back.

The first is setup. Every new project spends weeks on the same groundwork before anyone builds a feature:

• local environments
• CI pipelines
• hosting wiring
• code quality tooling
• a test harness

The second is drift. Once a project is running it grows its own arrangement of tooling, so a year later moving a developer between 2 of your own sites means learning 2 different machines.

Neither cost appears on a budget line, and both are paid again on every project.

Installed once and kept current: local environment, CI pipelines and hosting

Vortex(Opens in a new tab/window) is a Drupal project template: a tested foundation you install once, pick features from, and then keep current for the life of the project.

The template is the pre-configured Drupal project itself, wired together and working on day 1:

• a containerised local environment
• CI pipelines
• hosting integrations
• code quality tooling
• a testing harness

Documentation ships with it, including an onboarding checklist for new team members. An installer adds only the features you chose, from hosting and CI provider through to theme and AI agent instructions. On the current line that tool is the installer; the next major moves the job into a dedicated Vortex CLI.

That upgrade path is what separates Vortex from a starter kit, which is a one-time copy frozen at whatever it got right in its year. Vortex keeps the path open, so a project set up in its first year can adopt improvements made in its third through the same tool that created it.

For a client, that reads as continuity: the foundation under your site keeps getting the improvements made after your project started.

Whichever features you pick, local, CI and hosting all run the same provisioning path. That single decision is where "works on my machine" stops being a recurring argument.

The quality gates arrive switched on: secret scanning, static analysis, 90 per cent coverage

Plenty of templates leave quality tooling as an exercise for the reader. Vortex ships the gates configured and running across the whole codebase:

• secret scanning
• dependency auditing
• container linting
• static analysis
• coding standards

A 90 per cent code coverage threshold fails the build by default, with the result posted back onto the pull request. Visual regression waits behind an opt-in label, so an expensive check runs only on the changes that warrant it. Third-party CI actions are pinned by commit hash, a ready answer to a supply-chain question many teams are now being asked.

Every gate can be switched off with a single variable, and that matters more than it sounds. A team can adopt the pipeline on day 1 without being blocked by it, then tighten it as they go. It is the difference between a pipeline people keep and one they quietly delete.

The documentation is held to the same standard: linted, tested, and gated against drifting out of step with the code.

9 years in and busier than ever: 111 releases across Drupal 7 to 11

The usual failure mode of a project template is quiet abandonment: excellent for 18 months, then attention moves elsewhere and the repository goes still.

Vortex began in July 2017 and has shipped 111 releases since. It has tracked Drupal 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11 across their lives, and today it targets Drupal 11.

Releases go out on a stated monthly cadence, borne out across the recent run. A second major version is already published alongside the first, with the release plumbing built so that promoting a new major to the default is a single configuration change.

It is being developed more actively today than in any year of its life.

111 releases since 2017, across Drupal 7 to Drupal 11, and busier today than in any year of its life.

For a client, that history reads as low risk: the foundation under your project is maintained by the team you are already working with.

Open source under GPL-3.0, and used on the work we are paid for

Vortex is open source under GPL-3.0 and developed in public: repository, issue tracker, releases and documentation are all open. Community support runs through Drupal Slack and GitHub issues, and paid support is available for teams that want a commercial contact behind it.

We use it ourselves, which is the part that keeps it honest. Our own website runs on Vortex and is offered openly as a reference for what a long-lived Vortex project looks like, and the client platforms we support run on it too. The template meets real delivery pressure, not only its own test suite.

The flow runs both ways. Tools that began inside client work ship with Vortex, including our Behat step library(Opens in a new tab/window), CI runner image(Opens in a new tab/window) and artifact deployer(Opens in a new tab/window). Pieces that outgrow it are published in their own right.

For teams paying the setup cost on every Drupal project

Everything on this page is 4 of our services pointed at our own product: the architecture of the template, its development, the DevOps and hosting wiring it ships with, and the support and maintenance that has kept it current since 2017. The same template ships the AI agent instructions behind our AI-assisted delivery, and the gates decide what is allowed to merge.

If you run a portfolio of Drupal sites, or a team that starts a new project every few months, this is the shape the engagement takes: your sites build, test and deploy the same way, new developers onboard against a stack they have seen before, and improvements arrive through the same tool that set the project up.

If your Drupal projects have each grown their own build and nobody can move between them, tell us what your setup looks like today.

The website a Melbourne conveyancing practice has to stand behind

Choosing a conveyancer happens fast. Someone has a contract in hand, a settlement date already moving toward them, and perhaps 10 minutes to decide who to call.

In that window a website has to explain a process most people go through a handful of times in their lives. It also has to show, by how carefully it is built, that the firm behind it is careful too.

RET Conveyancing is a licensed conveyancing practice in Melbourne. Conveyancing is the legal transfer of property, and the firm covers the full range of it, including the work many firms would rather pass on:

• self-managed super fund work
• trust work
• subdivisions
• developer work

It is a small, director-led team whose whole positioning is precision and low risk, which is a high bar for a website to meet.

What we built: Drupal 11, a component library and client intake forms

The site runs on Drupal(Opens in a new tab/window) 11 with a single page type and a library of components the team stacks to build any page:

• heroes, media and text bands
• service grids and icon cards
• statistics and explainer steps
• team profiles and testimonials
• FAQ accordions
• an office map with opening times

Each editorial component has a matching front-end component in the theme, one to one, so what an editor assembles is exactly what a visitor gets. For the firm, that means a new page is something their own team assembles, not a job that comes back to us.

The firm also takes work in through the site: an enquiry form, and 4 client intake forms covering a purchase, a sale and the matched pair either side of a related-party transfer. We built them natively in Drupal rather than on a separate form product, which means:

• one interface for the team
• one place where uploaded documents live
• every file scanned before it is stored

That last part matters when the uploads are identity documents and contracts.

How the build stayed predictable: one blueprint, a generated backlog

A small site is no reason to improvise. We started from one versioned blueprint describing the whole content model and generated the delivery backlog from it, each story naming what it depends on.

Components were built before the pages that assemble them, so by the time page building began, every part a page needed already existed. We were just as deliberate about what not to build: established Drupal modules carry the forms, search, maps and opening hours, and only the presentation is custom.

The design reference lived in the repository as a static prototype beside the code, which turns "does it match the design" from an opinion into a difference anyone can point at. And when the finish date moved by a day, we sent that as its own note before anyone had to ask. For a client who chose us on precision, that is the only shape bad news should take.

Vortex: the same machinery a government platform runs on

This is the part we would most like people to notice. The site is built on Vortex(Opens in a new tab/window), our open-source Drupal project template, and inherits everything that comes with it:

• a build, test and deploy pipeline that runs on every change
• separate development, staging and production environments
• dependency updates that arrive automatically as pull requests
• coding standards and static analysis enforced automatically
• automated browser tests over the journeys that matter

None of that is remarkable on a government platform. It is remarkable on a small practice's website, and it should not be.

The investment in that tooling was made years ago, so the marginal cost of bringing it here was close to nothing. What the firm gets for it is a site that takes updates through automated tests, deploys through the same pipeline on every change, and could be handed to any competent Drupal team tomorrow.

What that buys a small firm is time: updates arrive as pull requests to review rather than a project to schedule, so the team only touches the site when they have something to say.

Where it stands: built, handed over, kept current

The build ran through June 2026 and went to the firm for review with a written guide to building pages, adding media, managing menus and reviewing enquiries. We have kept the platform current since: core and the project template were last updated in late July 2026.

A small practice's website, running the same build, test and deploy pipeline a government platform runs on.

A website for a small practice does not need heroics. It needs to stay current, stay fast, and keep working quietly while the team gets on with settlements.

That is a maintenance question as much as a build question, and it is the part small sites most often go without.

For firms whose website is the first proof of care

Everything on this page is 4 of our services running on one small practice's website: UX and design, Drupal development, DevOps and hosting on an automated pipeline, and ongoing support and maintenance. The same engineering is available with AI-assisted delivery where it suits the work, at the same tested standard.

If you run a conveyancing practice, a law firm, or any small professional business where the website is the first evidence of how carefully you work, this is the shape the engagement takes: a component library your own team builds pages from, intake forms that accept client documents safely, and a platform kept current after handover.

If your client intake still arrives as email attachments, or your site is old enough that nobody wants to touch it, tell us how the work comes in.

What a radio station asks of a website: recurrence, not a calendar

Ask a content management system for a schedule and it gives you a calendar. A radio schedule is a different animal.

Programs recur on their own patterns:

• weekly
• fortnightly
• on the second Tuesday of the month
• on the last Sunday of the month

The listener does not care about the pattern. They want to know whether their program is on this week, and what is playing right now.

The station broadcasts programming by and for communities that commercial and public radio do not reach. It is volunteer-run and listener-sponsored, and a supporter can name the program they are backing when they subscribe.

Almost everything about how a station like this works becomes a requirement on its website: a presenter publishing their own show, decades of broadcasting that has to stay reachable.

Our part in the work: an engineering partner on a Drupal 11 rebuild

Drupal(Opens in a new tab/window) 7 reached end of life, so the station's platform needed a new home. A partner agency brought us in as their engineering partner for the rebuild.

Since 2025 we have worked alongside their team on a Drupal 11 build, providing:

• technical leadership
• platform architecture
• migration engineering
• the delivery process

The brief was never only to move the site. It was to make sure the parts that run every day keep running on their own.

A schedule that tells the truth: weekly, fortnightly and monthly recurrence

We modelled recurrence the way broadcast actually works. Each program carries its own pattern, down to last and second-to-last of the month, the 2 cases most systems quietly decline to handle. Upcoming episodes are generated ahead of time and refreshed automatically, so the schedule a listener sees stays in step with what goes to air.

Then there is the part that only appears once a station is on air. A program booked for 9 o'clock does not begin at 9 o'clock exactly.

Recordings start a little early and run a little long, and the platform matches each recording back to the program that produced it within a tolerance. Without that, the audio archive would be a pile of unlabelled files, and that archive is a large part of what a station with decades behind it actually is.

Bringing the archive across: a Drupal 7 migration with its history intact

The migration from Drupal 7 carried across:

• hundreds of programs with their history
• the station's members and volunteers
• the taxonomy that organises decades of broadcasting
• more than 1,000 redirects, so links people saved years ago still land where they expect

For a client, that reads as continuity: the archive, the people and the saved links arrive with the content, rather than being rebuilt by hand after launch.

Getting there meant joining 2 live databases in a single query, which Drupal does not do out of the box, and knowing where Drupal 7 keeps content that looks absent until you check the right table. Migrations fail quietly on details like that, so the ones this one turned up are written into the codebase.

Built so the station can run it: roles, automation and a live player

A community station's day belongs to its programs, not to its website. The routine work happens by itself:

• upcoming episodes appear ahead of time
• recordings are attributed to the shows that made them
• the schedule keeps itself current
• the program catalogue comes straight from the station's podcast platform rather than being retyped

The live player was built for the audio format the station actually broadcasts, so listening works from the first page. For a client, that reads as time back: the hours that would go into keeping a website current go into programming instead.

Permissions follow how a volunteer-run station is really organised, with presenters, announcers, program makers and station managers each holding exactly the access their part of the station needs. A presenter can publish their own show, and only their own show.

The build runs on Vortex(Opens in a new tab/window), our open-source Drupal project template, with automated end-to-end tests over the journeys that matter, written on our published Behat step library(Opens in a new tab/window).

Where it stands: a Drupal 11 platform in active build through 2026

This is current work: a Drupal 11 platform, actively being built out through 2026. The schedule, the archive, the volunteer roster and the sponsorship model are one system, and each has edge cases only a real station produces.

Hundreds of programs, decades of archive and more than 1,000 saved links, carried from Drupal 7 onto Drupal 11.

Getting them right once is what lets a station's team spend their time on programming rather than on the website.

For platforms kept running by volunteers

Everything on this page is 4 of our services running on one live platform: platform architecture for a schedule broadcast actually produces, custom development for the parts no module covers, migration engineering off Drupal 7, and the DevOps and hosting that keeps releases repeatable.

If you run a community broadcaster, a member-funded not-for-profit, or any organisation whose website is maintained between shifts by people with another job to do, this is the shape the engagement takes: routine work built to happen on its own, roles that match how the organisation is really staffed, and an archive that survives the move. Where budget is the constraint, the same engineering is available with AI-assisted delivery, at the same tested standard.

If your Drupal 7 site is still carrying the schedule, the archive or the membership your organisation runs on, tell us what it has to keep doing.

Scattered research: the evidence exists, finding it is the hard part

If your organisation holds knowledge other people need, the problem is rarely a shortage of material. In this centre's field the research is extensive, but it sits in departmental reports, evaluations, literature reviews and journal articles, spread across dozens of places.

A practitioner deciding what to try next rarely has an afternoon to go looking, and an employer trying to do the right thing for the first time often does not know the research exists at all.

Then there are the people the sector exists to serve, and their families, working out what good support should look like.

The centre set out to serve all 3 groups from one place: practical guidance on one side, the evidence underneath it on the other.

Our part in the work: technical leadership and Drupal delivery

A partner agency engaged us as their engineering partner on the build, while the relationship with the centre and the shape of the programme sat with them.

We provided technical leadership, architecture, platform engineering and ongoing maintenance. We also set the delivery process the build ran on:

• automated code quality checks
• automated tests over the journeys that matter
• a release cadence the team could plan around

An evidence base that stays where it is curated: a feed, not a rebuild

The most consequential decision on this project was about where the evidence lives.

The straightforward way to build a research library is to build one: a content type, an editorial workflow, and someone keeping thousands of bibliographic records tidy forever. We took the other route.

The centre's evidence base is curated in an established open-access research archive, by a team that has specialised in exactly that for 2 decades, and the hub consumes it. Records keep their attribution and their permanent links, so the collection stays whole and useful outside the hub as well as inside it.

That meant being a good neighbour to another organisation's system. A nightly sync that asks a partner to serialise its whole catalogue and then discards almost all of it becomes someone else's problem.

We built the feed the other way around, so the hub says what it already holds and asks only for what has changed. The library stays current, and the cost to the source stays flat as the collection grows. For a client, that is the difference between an integration that stays cheap to run and one that becomes a standing cost.

What the audiences got: a filterable evidence base

On the practice side, the hub carries best-practice guides, tools and professional development material, organised around how practitioners approach the work rather than how the material was produced.

On the evidence side, every record is a complete bibliographic entry:

• authorship and publisher
• publication details
• journal and peer-review status
• licence and subject

That depth is what makes the library filterable rather than merely searchable, and faceted search is the part practitioners lean on most.

One property matters more than the rest. Records carry their accessible-format status as a first-class, filterable field rather than as a tag, because a real share of this audience depends on those formats to read at all. Someone can ask the library for material they can actually read.

Built on an open-source design system, accessibility checked on every build

The hub runs on an open-source, accessible, component-based design system whose engineering we had led before this project began. Custom component work went only where this product genuinely differs from any other site: the filters that drive the resource library. Everything else came from the design system as it ships, which is the whole economic argument for using one.

Accessibility is checked continuously rather than at the end. On every build, an automated test reads the site's own sitemap, visits each landing page and records what it finds.

Because it discovers pages instead of working from a fixed list, a new section is covered the day it goes live, not the day someone remembers to add it to a test.

Both dates held: the first release on its promised day, the full hub early

The first release, for practitioners, went live on the date promised at the start. The full hub, serving every audience, arrived ahead of its date at the end of 2025.

2 delivery dates named at the start. Both held, and the second landed early.

Saying it plainly is the point: described, then built, then shipped, on the days that were named. For a client, a date that holds is the difference between planning a launch and hoping for one.

It has been live and in use ever since, and we are still the team on it:

• a steady release cadence
• design system upgrades
• search improvements
• accessibility fixes as they surface

For organisations whose evidence has to reach the people who use it

Everything on this page is 4 of our services running on one live knowledge platform: architecture that decided where the evidence should live, a migration that keeps it current without burdening the archive that curates it, accessibility checked automatically on every build, and ongoing support and maintenance since launch.

If you run a research centre, a peak body or a not-for-profit whose knowledge has to reach practitioners, this is the shape the engagement takes: one architectural decision about where the collection lives, a feed that keeps it current, and delivery dates named before the work starts and then met. The same engineering is available with AI-assisted delivery where it suits the work, at the same tested standard.

If your evidence base is scattered across reports, journals and someone else's archive, and you are weighing whether to rebuild it or feed from it, tell us where it sits today.

A community radio station's website is its second transmitter, and its archive

It carries the station's daily work:

• listeners find shows through it
• presenters publish through it
• members subscribe through it

Behind the front page sits what makes a specialist music station what it is: the record of every track it has ever put to air.

Someone catches half a song on the drive home and searches for it 3 days later. That only works if the history is still there and still addressable, which makes the back catalogue both institutional memory and the long tail of how a station gets found.

The station is member-supported and largely volunteer-run, and its presenters are volunteers with their own shows. A platform that needs someone performing a manual step at 9pm on a Tuesday will quietly stop working, because the person who would perform it has a day job.

Our part in the work: architecture, engineering and archive migration

A partner agency holds the relationship with the station and brought us in as their engineering partner. We have worked alongside their team since 2024, across the strands that make up the engagement:

• the solution architecture for a purpose-built radio platform
• the platform engineering and custom Drupal development
• the migration of the station's broadcast archive
• the build and deployment tooling the platform runs on

At the centre of it is a purpose-built radio platform for Drupal(Opens in a new tab/window). It models programs, episodes, presenters and tracks as first-class content, keeps them in step with the station's podcast platform, and serves the schedule wherever it is needed.

Its architecture documentation sits beside the code, so understanding how the platform works does not depend on one person's memory.

The website drives the recording hardware: from timeslot to podcast

This is the part we like best. Drupal is the system of record for the broadcast schedule, and it pushes that schedule out to the station's podcast platform, which records the live broadcast off air, cuts it into an episode, and syncs it back into Drupal as a published podcast.

So a producer changes a show's timeslot on the website, the recording system reconfigures itself, the broadcast is captured, and the podcast appears on the site. Nobody logs into the recording platform. Nobody has to remember.

For a client, that closed loop reads as staff time you do not spend: the step between a schedule change and a published episode does not need a person standing over it. The pattern travels well beyond radio: wherever an operational process hangs off a content change, the same closed loop is worth building.

Keeping the whole archive findable: staged migration and 301 redirects

Well over a decade of broadcast history sat in the station's legacy system: what was played, on which show, on which night. Moving a history that deep into a CMS is not a routine content migration, and the tempting shortcut is always to keep the recent years and let the rest go.

We kept all of it, and built the migration so that keeping it all was the safe choice rather than the brave one:

• the history lands in staging tables first, so the migration reads local data rather than a remote API
• the harvest is resumable, picking up cleanly after an interruption
• it runs newest first, so a partial run still leaves the site current
• every legacy track URL gets a permanent redirect, so years of links from blogs, forums and search results still land where they should

That is the difference between preserving an archive and merely storing one. For a client, it reads as traffic kept rather than lost: the links people already have, and the results already indexed, still land on a page.

Well over a decade of broadcast history kept whole, with a permanent redirect on every legacy track URL.

What listeners and presenters get: a persistent player and a fortnight-ahead guide

The live stream plays in a player that keeps playing as you move around the site, so browsing does not cut the music. Around it sits what a station needs to publish:

• a program guide that runs a fortnight ahead
• a playlist on every episode of what actually went to air
• a gig guide that turns submissions from the public into published events
• news and artist interviews

Access is shaped around how a volunteer station really runs: each presenter manages their own program's episodes and playlists, and the people coordinating gigs, interviews and promotions get exactly the access they need.

Built to be handed on: automated tests, accessibility checks and Vortex

A platform is only as good as what happens after the build, so this one is made to be carried on by whoever works on it next:

• automated tests covering the platform at unit, kernel and browser level
• a mock of the podcast platform's API standing in for the live service in tests
• accessibility checks running automatically on every build
• the project sitting on Vortex(Opens in a new tab/window), our open-source Drupal project template, so its build and deployment tooling is maintained upstream

Known issues are written down with the reasoning for when each will be picked up, because technical debt handled out loud is a habit worth having. Nearly 2 years in, we are still building it.

For platforms where the archive is the asset

Everything on this page is 4 of our services running on one platform: solution architecture for a purpose-built content model, custom Drupal development, an archive migration built to be resumed rather than restarted, and the build and deployment tooling underneath it.

If you run a broadcaster, a publisher, or any member-supported organisation whose back catalogue is the reason people find you, this is the shape the engagement takes: an archive treated as first-class content rather than an attachment, a migration that keeps every legacy URL addressable, and the operational steps that would otherwise fall to a person driven from the CMS instead. The same engineering is available with AI-assisted delivery where it suits the work, at the same tested standard.

If you are moving a long archive onto a new platform and cannot afford to lose what is already indexed, tell us what the archive looks like.

When the design system is already decided: a fixed identity and a fixed date

If you are standing up a public website inside a government identity, most of the visual decisions were made before your project started. The typography, the colour, the header, the footer and the accessibility bar all arrive as a standard you have to meet, and the launch date is usually set at the same time.

What is left to decide is how the site gets built. Which components exist, what each one is worth, and where the effort actually sits. That last question is where the cost hides, because the effort rarely lands where people expect it to.

How we came into the work: Drupal build partner behind a Canberra agency

In 2024 a Canberra digital agency working across Australian federal government brought us in as their Drupal(Opens in a new tab/window) build partner on a public website for a Defence portfolio agency. Their team carried the client relationship, the design and the delivery management. We provided the estimating and the Drupal engineering behind it, front end and back end.

That split works well for both sides. The agency keeps its client relationship whole and keeps owning the work it does best, while the build capability sits behind it without the client having to manage 2 conversations.

Mapping the build feature by feature: 2 figures on every line

Before any code, we mapped the site feature by feature and costed every line twice, once for the back end and once for the front end. Header, footer, banners, breadcrumbs, side navigation, the landing page system, news, search and the content migration all sat on one sheet with 2 figures each.

3 useful things fall out of an estimate shaped that way:

• the front end carries most of the cost, roughly 60 percent of the total on this build, which is the reverse of what most people assume
• accessibility gets a price, with skip-to-main-content and the Acknowledgement of Country appearing as their own costed lines rather than being folded into other features
• contingency stays in the open, sitting beside the base figure as its own line, which makes it something to discuss rather than something to absorb

Mobile navigation alone was an order of magnitude heavier on the front end than on the back. If a design-system site has ever felt more expensive than it looked, that ratio is why.

Naming the accessibility lines makes them visible, and visible things are harder to drop quietly when a number has to come down. For a client, that reads as a priced map rather than a single number: you can see what each component is worth before anyone commits to it.

What we built: a landing page system, news, search and a content migration

The site carries the full set of parts a public government site needs:

• a landing page system with sliders, embedded frames, and card lists that either assemble themselves from published content or are curated by hand
• news with authors, related links and its own search
• a results page for site-wide search
• content pages carrying resources and related links alongside the body

Underneath that sits the furniture a government site lives on: static and video banners, breadcrumbs, side navigation, a back-to-top control, a skip link, an Acknowledgement of Country in the footer, and content styling for typography, quotes, tables and icons. The existing content came across through a manual migration.

The engagement did not stop at the build. Feature work continued into 2025, a year on from the original build. For an agency partner, that reads as continuity: the team that built the components is the team that extends them.

What we kept from it: the dual estimate for component-heavy builds

The dual estimate is now how we cost component-heavy builds. One sheet, 2 figures per feature, accessibility priced on its own line, contingency stated separately.

On this build, roughly 60 percent of the estimate sat in the front end, the reverse of what most people assume.

It gives a client something more useful than a blended number: a picture of where the money actually goes, and 2 halves that can be sequenced, resourced or trimmed independently of each other. For an agency partner, it is also a far easier conversation to have with an end client than a lump sum.

For teams building inside a design system they did not choose

Everything on this page is 2 of our services on one government website build: Drupal development across the front end and the back end, to an identity that was already set, and a manual migration of the existing content. The feature-by-feature estimate sat in front of both.

If you are a digital agency carrying a government client, or a team standing up a public site inside a design system you did not choose, this is the shape the engagement takes: a build partner behind your own team, an estimate that prices every component twice, and accessibility and contingency named as their own lines. The same engineering is available with AI-assisted delivery where it suits the work.

If you are pricing a design-system build and want to know where the effort will actually land, send us the component list.

When the website is the public record: a federal publication estate

Some organisations have a website because they need one. Others have a website because it is the record. If your work is to give public advice, the site is where that advice gets published, cited, downloaded and checked again years later, long after the news cycle that produced it has moved on.

The Climate Change Authority is an independent statutory body that advises the Australian Government on climate policy: emissions reduction targets, the Emissions Reduction Fund, the Renewable Energy Target, the Carbon Farming Initiative.

Its website carries that record:

• annual reports
• corporate plans
• strategic frameworks
• the outcomes of Authority meetings
• public submissions filed by industry and community organisations

More than 1,000 documents, and the people who come looking are usually after one specific thing.

That is a publication estate, not a brochure site. It sets a different bar: findable, readable, accessible, and stable for a very long time.

Our part: the CivicTheme sub-theme, build and configuration

We were brought in for one thing: to move the site onto CivicTheme(Opens in a new tab/window), the Australian government design system. We help build and maintain CivicTheme itself, so this was familiar ground. A migration onto a design system tends to go faster when the people doing it know why each component is shaped the way it is.

It was a short and precise engagement in 2023. We delivered:

• the site's CivicTheme sub-theme and the configuration around it
• the front-end build and the component workflow the theme depends on
• the local tooling the next developer would reach for

Then we handed the platform back. The Authority's own team and its partners have carried the site forward since, which is how a migration should end. For a client, that shape reads as a bounded cost: a specialist engagement with an end date, not a dependency.

Building inside GovCMS SaaS, a platform that allows no custom code

The site runs on GovCMS(Opens in a new tab/window) SaaS, the Australian Government's shared Drupal(Opens in a new tab/window) platform. There are no custom modules on that platform, and there structurally cannot be. Core, the distribution and the contributed modules all arrive in the platform image, and an automated check refuses a deployment if anything unexpected turns up in it.

That sounds like a limit on what you can build. It is really a limit on how. Everything we delivered lives in the theme and in configuration, and that turns out to be a discipline rather than a compromise:

• no bespoke module to maintain
• no bespoke upgrade path to plan around
• a platform free to keep the software underneath the site patched

Constraints like these reward knowing the platform well. The front-end build had to fit a host that runs no build step of its own, and the platform's own code checks had to pass cleanly on files that nobody writes by hand. Both are the kind of problem you solve once and then stop paying for.

What a design system actually buys you: no bespoke content types or fields

The site uses CivicTheme's content model exactly as it comes. Not one bespoke content type, not one bespoke field.

That is easy to skim past, and it is the whole cost argument for design systems. Every custom field is something a person has to understand, document, test and carry through the next upgrade, indefinitely. A federal publication estate needed none of them, because the design system already covered the job.

What is left to look after is a thin layer of styling on top of a library that other people keep improving. For a client, that reads as a smaller bill to carry: you maintain the styling, not the system underneath it.

Accessibility works the same way. In a design system it is a property of the shared components, maintained once for everyone who uses them, rather than a line item in each agency's budget.

Where it landed: live on CivicTheme, carried by the client's own team

The Climate Change Authority's website is live at climatechangeauthority.gov.au(Opens in a new tab/window) and runs CivicTheme.

More than 1,000 documents on a federal publication estate, and not one bespoke content type behind them.

Our part was brief and deliberately so. A migration done well ends with a client who no longer needs the specialists, and that is what happened here: development continued in the hands of the Authority's team and its partners.

The design system underneath is still maintained and still improving, and the site inherits that work without commissioning any of it.

For agencies whose website is the public record

Everything on this page is 2 of our services on one federal publication estate: a migration onto a government design system, and development delivered entirely in theme and configuration on a platform that allows no custom code.

If you run a GovCMS site, or any publication estate that has to stay findable and accessible for years, this is the shape the engagement takes: a short specialist migration onto CivicTheme, a stock content model wherever the design system already covers the job, and your own team carrying the site afterwards. The same work is available with AI-assisted delivery where it suits the scope.

If you are weighing a move onto CivicTheme, or wondering what GovCMS SaaS will and will not let you build, tell us what your site has to keep publishing.

The tests every Drupal project writes twice: logins, content, email, logs

Automated tests for a website are usually written in near-English, a sentence per action. "Given I am logged in as a user with the administrator role." "Then an email should be sent to the applicant."

That is deliberate: the people who decide what a site must do can read what is being checked.

Behind each of those sentences sits real code. Someone has to implement, in PHP, what "logged in as an administrator" means, what counts as an email being sent, and how a test knows a file actually downloaded.

And the sentences repeat from project to project:

• sign in as a role
• create content
• check an email went out
• confirm nothing landed in the site's error log

Writing them the first time costs a few days. Keeping them is the part nobody budgets for.

They live in your repository, and they need attention every time Drupal(Opens in a new tab/window) moves. They are never what your project is actually about, and when they break, testing quietly stops.

A library you take a piece at a time: Behat steps as PHP traits

behat-steps(Opens in a new tab/window) is that set of steps, written once, tested and maintained. It ships as PHP traits, so a project imports the pieces it wants and nothing else.

Take the email assertions without inheriting anything you did not ask for, and keep every step your team has already written sitting alongside them.

Small parts rather than a single base class is what makes the library safe to adopt gradually. You add a piece, nothing you had before changes, and you decide about the rest later.

It covers the common ground of Drupal testing:

• authentication and roles
• content
• email
• file downloads
• media
• error-log checks

For a client, that reads as a shorter start: the test suite on your project begins with the common ground already written and already maintained.

Where it came from: a Drupal test context cut from 300 lines to 46

It started on a real project in 2018, a Victorian government health department website reached through a government digital agency.

That project had built itself a thorough set of test steps:

• email assertions
• file downloads
• media handling
• error-log checks

All of it solid work, and none of it specific to a health department.

So we pulled the generic parts out into a package we would maintain. The project's own test class went from roughly 300 lines of bespoke step definitions to 46 lines that simply compose the imported ones, with every check it had before still in place.

The department kept its coverage and stopped owning the plumbing underneath it. Every project we have worked on since has had those steps for free.

The decisions that make it safe to rely on: strict error-log checks

A library like this earns trust in the details. Checking Drupal's error log after every scenario is the classic source of false alarms, because some scenarios are supposed to trigger an error.

The easy answer is to soften the check for everyone. Instead, a test can declare that it expects an error, so the check stays strict everywhere else.

Sometimes the behaviour that needs adjusting sits further upstream, in the shared Drupal testing driver the library builds on. When that is the right home for a fix, it goes there rather than being worked around on every project, and we have been contributing to that driver for years.

Where it ended up: whole-of-government Victoria and community radio

A library extracted from a single health department project went on to underpin the Victorian Government's Single Digital Presence, the shared platform behind vic.gov.au and the agency sites around it. Years later it was doing the same job on a community radio station's rebuild.

It ships as part of Vortex(Opens in a new tab/window), our open-source Drupal project template, so every project we start inherits it.

It has been maintained since 2018, across Drupal 7 through to Drupal 11, which is a long time for a package to stay useful in a platform that changes as much as Drupal does.

300 lines of test glue became 46 lines of composition, and a package maintained since 2018 across Drupal 7 to Drupal 11.

It also carries contributions from developers with no connection to DrevOps. People do not send patches to code they are not depending on.

For a client, that track record is the point: the steps your suite depends on have outlived the projects that introduced them.

What it adds up to: Drupal testing that starts already built

The library is public, so any Drupal team can use it without ever talking to us. Testing gets skipped when it is expensive to start, and the quickest way to make it cheap is to stop asking every project to rebuild the same foundations.

When we take on a platform, that groundwork is already done and maintained. The effort goes into the parts that are actually yours.

For teams rewriting the same Drupal test steps

Everything on this page is 2 of our services pointed at our own tooling: development of the library, and the ongoing support and maintenance that has kept it current from Drupal 7 through to Drupal 11. The same standard applies to our AI-assisted delivery: however fast the code arrives, the automated checks are what decide it is safe to ship.

If you run a Drupal site whose test suite nobody wants to open, or a team writing the same step definitions on every new project, this is the shape the engagement takes. The generic steps come from a maintained library, your own steps sit beside them, and the only checks you own are the ones specific to your business.

If your last Drupal upgrade was verified by hand because nobody trusts the automated suite, tell us what it covers today.

When a website is where people go for health, housing and concessions

People arrive at a health and human services website with a real question, often at a difficult moment:

• someone checking whether they qualify for a concession
• a parent trying to understand a family service
• a nurse looking up clinical guidance
• an adult asking for the records of their own childhood in care

The site either answers the question or it does not.

The Victorian Department of Health and Human Services ran one of the largest web estates in the state, covering consumer health information, concessions, housing, disability, family services, records access, and clinical guidance for the health sector. Many audiences, many editorial teams, one shared expectation that the information will be right and reachable.

Drupal engineering inside the Salsa Digital partnership

The work reached us through Salsa Digital(Opens in a new tab/window), a government digital agency whose teams carried strategy, design and content across the department's properties. We joined as their engineering partner and stayed for 4 years, providing:

• platform engineering
• build and release tooling
• Drupal(Opens in a new tab/window) development
• content migration
• decoupled front-end work

Some of it was new architecture. A lot of it was the quieter work of making several teams' releases predictable.

Several audiences, one Drupal codebase and one content platform

3 of the department's public websites, serving citizens, funded organisations and service providers, were consolidated into a single Drupal codebase. One map of the estate drives everything downstream: the build, each site's settings, deployment, the test suite and the theme. Each site keeps its own visual identity through configuration rather than code, so an editorial team can change how their site looks without waiting for a developer release.

A separate content platform then decoupled the department's content from its presentation, so several front ends could share one editorial spine. It carried a consumer health encyclopaedia, professional guidance published as open data, service directories with eligibility and access details, and a records access service. Editors describe intent, such as whether a page offers text to speech or a printable version, and each front end decides how to honour it.

Built for the people on the other end: accessibility and a link-safe migration

The front ends built on that platform are server-rendered JavaScript applications, and 2 things matter about how they behave. Every part of a page is assembled independently, so one troublesome component degrades on its own instead of taking the page with it.

The second is accessibility, treated as implementation rather than aspiration:

• screen-reader headings
• focus management on dialogs
• proper tab and panel semantics for medical citations
• built-in text to speech

Migration mattered for the same reason. People bookmark government pages, print them, cite them in letters and share them in community groups, and search engines have years of them indexed.

The migration was built so those links survived: content from the legacy system was rebuilt as structured, reusable page components, and old-style page and document addresses were resolved on the new platform and served the right file. For a client, that is what a link-safe migration buys: the address saved in a bookmark or printed in a letter still leads somewhere after launch day.

Built once, released safely: containers and continuous integration

Underneath all of it we changed how the code was built and shipped. In 6 days in 2018, a live government Drupal site moved onto containers and managed dependencies, with the application built exactly once, in continuous integration, and that identical build used everywhere afterwards.

One self-documenting set of commands ran it, so every developer and the pipeline did the same thing. Releases were designed to fail quietly: a dry run by default, and a release that did not complete cleanly left visitors seeing the site exactly as it was. For a client, that is what a safe release means: a release that does not land costs you a wait, not a broken site.

What it left behind: 2 open-source tools still shipping

We worked across 4 of the department's properties over 4 years, and the tooling outlived the engagement.

2 things that began as answers to real problems on these sites are open source today and still maintained. drevops/behat-steps(Opens in a new tab/window), a library of reusable automated test steps for Drupal, was extracted from the department's sport and recreation site and later became a dependency of the Victorian Government's central content platform.

And the containerised project template built in that week in 2018 is the direct ancestor of Vortex(Opens in a new tab/window), the open-source Drupal project template we ship on every project today.

4 properties over 4 years, and 2 of the tools built for them are open source and maintained today.

That is the part we are proudest of: solving a real problem twice, then giving the answer away.

For government estates where the information has to be right

Everything on this page is 4 of our services running across one government web estate: architecture and development on a shared Drupal codebase, content migration that keeps the addresses people already have, build and release engineering, and accessibility built in rather than bolted on.

If you run a government web estate, a health service, or several public sites that share one editorial team, this is the shape the engagement takes: one codebase behind several sites, migrations that keep existing addresses resolving, and releases safe enough to be routine. The same engineering is available with AI-assisted delivery where it suits the work, at the same tested standard.

If your estate has spread across several ageing sites, or a migration is coming and the links people already have worry you, tell us what the estate looks like.