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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 question every parts buyer asks first: does this part fit?

Someone whose appliance has stopped working does not want to learn about part numbers. They want the right filter, the right seal, the right battery, and to be certain before they pay. Get it wrong and the part comes back, the refund goes out, the sale is gone.

Behind that sit 2 more doubts, so the whole purchase turns on 3 questions:

• will this part fit my machine
• when will it arrive
• is it genuine

Answering all 3 plainly is how a parts store earns its living.

One engagement, bought in pieces: identity, data, search, storefront

The business is an owner-operated Australian retailer selling parts nationally through its own BigCommerce storefront and the major marketplace channels, and it is growing into new appliance categories. We were engaged directly, and the first thing we settled together was the order of work, not a design or a technology.

The engagement runs as 5 independent streams:

• the visual identity
• the compatibility data
• the fitment search on top of it
• improvements to the current store
• the rebuild

Only the rebuild has a real predecessor: it implements the identity, so it waits, and we said so in the quotation instead of starting it at low intensity. For a client, that reads as control: each stream starts when it is worth starting, and nothing sits half-built while it waits.

Across the streams we have provided discovery, brand and design, architecture, data engineering and development.

A brand decided by looking: personas, logo systems, complete directions

The business already had the verbal half of its brand, commissioned separately and approved. Ours is the visual half.

We started with the customers rather than a mood board:

• personas built from the store's own order data
• a brand brief
• a visual audit of the category

Then, rather than argue for a single direction, we built several complete ones and set them side by side, each with its own logo system, colour, typography and mockups, so the choice could be made by looking rather than by imagining.

2 moments matter. Our first persona analysis leaned on a sample that under-counted parts of the catalogue; the client caught it, we rebuilt it from the authoritative export with numbered corrections, and the recommendation held. Correcting ourselves in public bought more trust than being right would have.

Later the owner drew his own mark, so we vectorised it and rebuilt the identity around it.

Turning fitment into structured data and a live search widget

Which machines a part fits is the most important fact about that part, and in a catalogue grown over years that knowledge lives in the product description, written by whoever put it there.

Our job was to turn it into data the store can use. We built a scripted, unit-tested, rerunnable pipeline that reads the catalogue, extracts every compatible-model mention, and resolves the ambiguous ones into clean brand, series and model records mapped to the products that fit them.

AI does a single job in that chain, the judgement call; the rest is deterministic code that can be tested and re-run. Every mapped row keeps the sentence it came from, and because an AI pass always discards something, the discards are reviewed as a deliverable in their own right.

On top of that data sits the finder. A firm rule against recurring app fees ruled out every paid fitment app, and the constraint produced better engineering.

We used the platform's own category system as the managed vocabulary of machine models, native and free, then built the search as a small widget reading live from the storefront's GraphQL API. No app, no monthly fee. A customer types their model and sees only the parts that suit it, whether that part fits a single machine or hundreds.

Changing a live catalogue: a staged, reversible deployment

A catalogue-wide change on a store that is taking orders today is what keeps an owner awake, so the deployment is written down before it runs, as a document for the client. It is staged rather than a single switch, with the safeguards written into the plan:

• every stage individually reversible
• a full store export as the restore point
• idempotent scripts
• a rehearsal on a sandbox before production
• the original descriptions archived rather than replaced
• rollback triggers agreed in advance on business measures rather than error logs

For a store owner, that reads as a decision they can reverse: any stage can be stopped and undone on measures the business already watches.

The rebuild, meanwhile, has its discovery banked, including an information architecture organised around compatibility rather than product categories and built from the start to carry additional product ranges.

And since a brand cycle runs for months, we sorted the current store's improvement work by whether an item survives the rebuild, so what holds its value can go ahead now.

Where it stands: identity delivered, fitment search proven in a sandbox

• the identity is locked and the brand book delivered
• the fitment search is proven in a sandbox and waiting on the production data load
• the migration is planned but not yet run

A fitment search built on the storefront's own category system and GraphQL API: no app, no monthly fee.

What is already paying off is the order the work is being done in.

For stores where the wrong part comes back

Everything on this page is 5 of our services running on one live retail catalogue: discovery and sequencing, brand and design, architecture, migration of the product data, and custom development on the storefront. The extraction pipeline is AI-assisted delivery in its plainest form: AI makes the judgement call, deterministic code does the rest, and what the AI discards is reviewed by a person.

If you sell parts, spares or consumables where the buyer has to be sure a product fits before they pay, this is the shape the engagement takes: compatibility pulled out of the descriptions it is buried in, a search built from what the platform already gives you, and a catalogue-wide change staged so it can be stopped and undone.

If your product descriptions know what fits but your storefront does not, tell us what your catalogue looks like.

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 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 organisation here is an independent federal statutory body that advises government on national policy. Its website carries:

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

The people who come looking are usually after a specific document.

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 in the work: a CivicTheme migration in 2023

We were brought in for a single job: 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. Across it we:

• built the site's CivicTheme sub-theme and the configuration around it
• set up the front-end build and the component workflow the theme depends on
• added the local tooling the next developer would reach for
• handed the platform back

The organisation's own team and its partners have carried the site forward since, which is how a migration should end.

Theme and configuration only: building where the platform allows no custom code

The site runs on a shared government hosting 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

For a client, that reads as fewer things to own: what we hand back is a theme and a set of configuration, not a codebase somebody has to keep alive.

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: a stock content model

The site uses CivicTheme's content model exactly as it comes: no bespoke content types, no bespoke fields.

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 maintenance bill that stops growing: the fields nobody built are the fields nobody has to test, document or upgrade.

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 on by the organisation's own team

The site is live and runs CivicTheme.

A federal publication estate rebuilt on a shared design system, with no bespoke content types and no bespoke fields.

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 organisation'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 government sites that have to stay findable for years

Everything on this page is 2 of our services on one federal publication estate: a migration onto a government design system, and the development that makes that design system fit a hosting platform which allows no custom code.

If you run a site whose value is the documents on it, an agency, a statutory body or a regulator, this is the shape the engagement takes: a short bounded migration, everything delivered in theme and configuration, and a handover to the team who will run it afterwards. The same work is available with AI-assisted delivery where it suits the job, at the same tested standard.

If your site still carries a bespoke theme, and every accessibility fix and every new component lands on your own budget, ask us what moving onto CivicTheme would take.

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.

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.

When a website has to sell a regulated product: energy pricing before a quote

Most websites show a price. An energy retailer's website has to work one out first.

Before anyone can be quoted, the platform has to establish:

• which meter sits at their address
• which distributor serves it
• which tariffs apply
• which offers may legally be sold in that state

Only then is there a number to put on the screen. That chain runs live, while someone waits on a form.

Everything attached to it is regulated too, from the fact sheet that accompanies every offer to the wording on the offer itself. It is a transaction engine wearing a website's clothes, and it still has to stay editable by the marketing team.

Our part in the work: Drupal architecture and the delivery toolchain

The client is a national energy retailer, selling electricity and gas to households and small businesses across several states and territories. In 2020 it replatformed its public website onto Drupal(Opens in a new tab/window).

We were engaged through a partner agency, which ran the delivery programme, as the Drupal architecture and platform engineering partner, while a specialist design agency supplied the experience design.

Alongside the architecture, we stood up and ran the delivery toolchain the whole engineering team worked through:

• the source-control organisation
• the continuous integration account
• the automated code quality checks
• a containerised local environment so every developer ran the same stack

For a client, that shared setup reads as consistency: every developer on the programme worked to the same checks, whoever they worked for.

The brief itself was easy to state and hard to build: let the marketing and sales teams manage their own offers and content.

5 sign-up journeys, and one of them is moving house

The platform carries 5 separate sign-up journeys rather than one, because a household, a home office, a small business and a specialist offer are each sold and priced differently. The main one is a 5-step checkout.

Moving house has its own 7-step flow. Relocating is the highest-intent moment in energy retail, and it asks different questions: when the power needs to be on, and what a technician will find at the property.

That last part is what separates this from an ordinary web form. The output of the funnel is a work order for someone who will physically attend a house.

Around them sit the things regulation requires:

• energy fact sheets issued as part of the flow
• separate concession forms for the states that administer them their own way
• payment handled by dedicated providers

An address is not an address: validating it into a regulated meter identity

The hinge the whole funnel turns on is a translation the customer never sees. Someone types a street address the way they would write it on an envelope.

The platform validates it, then converts it into the shape the national electricity market registry expects, so a typed address becomes a regulated meter identity.

If one meter matches, the journey continues without the customer noticing. If several do, they pick from a short list. Electricity and gas resolve separately.

Everything downstream depends on that one step. Without a meter identity there is no distributor, without a distributor there are no tariffs, and without tariffs there is nothing that can lawfully be sold. It looks like a form field and it is actually the architecture.

Editable by the people who own the offers: a content model marketing can run

Energy offers change often and their presentation is regulated, so the people accountable for the wording need to change it without waiting for a release.

The offer model was built so every element of an offer card is separately editable, and page structure lives in a visual layout builder rather than in code. Giving the business that control was the stated goal of the replatform, and it is the part that outlasts a redesign.

For a marketing team, that reads as autonomy: changing the wording on an offer is a content edit, not a release.

What we carried forward: request logging and integration health

2 ideas from this build have shaped how we approach integration-heavy platforms since.

The first is request-scoped debug logging: when one page depends on a dozen live calls to other systems, you want the story of a whole request in one place, not scattered across log lines.

The second is treating the health of those integrations as a feature, so anyone can see which upstream systems are answering. We have since built that idea into a package of our own.

5 sign-up journeys and a 7-step move-home flow, all hanging off a single address lookup.

Most people picture Drupal as a content site. This was a regulated transaction engine with a content site attached, and the content management was the least interesting part of it.

For platforms where signing up is the product

Everything on this page is 3 of our services running on one regulated acquisition platform: Drupal architecture for a transaction-heavy build, development against live upstream systems, and the delivery toolchain and containerised environments the engineering team worked through.

If you sell a regulated product online, in energy, insurance or telecommunications, this is the shape the engagement takes: an architecture built around the one lookup everything downstream depends on, sign-up journeys designed per customer type, and a content model the business can change without a release. The same engineering is available with AI-assisted delivery where it suits the work.

If your sign-up funnel is the slowest part of your platform to change, or your quoting depends on systems you do not control, tell us what the funnel has to do.