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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.

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.

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.

When the website is the public record: a regulator's statutory publication channel

The organisation behind these websites is a state economic regulator. Its work is public and procedural:

• it sets the maximum prices people pay for essential services
• it licenses some of the utilities that provide them
• it runs formal public reviews with consultation periods, submissions and hearings

Its website is not a brochure. It is the regulator's statutory publication channel, and a determination is published at the moment it appears there.

The organisations it regulates, and the lawyers who advise them, cite that site, and those citations are expected to keep resolving for years. So the content cannot simply be copied across. Every document has to arrive with its identity, its dates, its attachments and its editorial state intact, which makes a replatform a records problem long before it is a website problem.

Migration architecture and platform engineering inside a government programme

A partner agency led the programme and brought us in as their engineering partner for the move onto a government-managed Drupal(Opens in a new tab/window) platform. We worked across both properties, the regulator's main site and a second site for one of the schemes it administers, and provided:

• migration architecture
• platform development
• front-end engineering

Government delivery is rarely a single team. Several suppliers and the regulator's own developer all worked in the same codebase alongside the design and content teams, and keeping that shared build coherent was part of our work.

2 systems, a single set of documents, reconciled across 3 identifiers

The documents the site publishes did not live in the old website. They live in the regulator's enterprise records management system, held as formal records with their own numbers and revisions.

That left 2 sources describing the same material, each holding half the answer. The legacy site knew which document belonged to which review, in what order and on what date. The records system held the authoritative file.

The same document could also be known by 3 different identifiers, depending on which system you asked. So we built the reconciliation. A single lookup resolves a document across all 3 and settles which wins.

Anything the records system has not yet sent gets a placeholder, so a review can be assembled now and completed on the next sync.

A migration you can run more than once, without republishing what was withdrawn

A migration this size is never a single run. You run it, review what landed, correct something, run it again, and that only works if the second run recognises what the first one created.

Legacy pages were known by their web addresses, so we derived each item's identifier from its own path: same path, same identifier, every run. Reviews that reference other reviews are built in a second pass. For a client, that is the difference between a migration you can rehearse and one you get a single attempt at.

The decision we would lead with, though, is smaller and matters more. If an editor had unpublished a page, re-running the migration left it unpublished. On a regulator's site that is not a nicety: a withdrawn determination that quietly reappears is a regulatory problem, not a content bug.

And we proved the result rather than asserting it, comparing the source data against what actually landed in Drupal.

Where the regulator's publishing rules live: review types encoded in the site

Which documents appear under which tab of a review depends on the kind of review it is, and those rules belong to the regulator, so we encoded them in the site itself. An editor publishes a document once, sees only the fields that apply to that review type, and it lands where the rules say it should.

The public gets a timeline that opens at today, and every review page offers an accessible copy of a document on request. For a client, that means the publishing rules live in the platform rather than in a style guide someone has to remember.

What it added up to: a migration delivered in releases, not a single cutover

The work began in 2020 and the build ran across 2021, released more than 70 times inside that single year. That is a release rhythm rather than a big-bang cutover, which is what most government teams are quietly hoping for. The legacy address structure was kept wholesale, including the front page, so published citations pointed at addresses that still existed after the move.

More than 70 releases inside a single year, then 2 years of upgrades by the next team.

Then we handed it over, and it kept going: the team that received the platform carried on releasing and upgrading it through the next 2 years of Drupal work. For a migration, that is the outcome worth measuring. Not only that it landed, but that the next team could keep it moving.

For migrations where the content carries legal weight

Everything on this page is 4 of our services on one government replatform: migration architecture, platform development, front-end engineering, and the deployment work that put both sites on a government-managed platform.

If you run a regulator, a department, or any public body whose website is where decisions are formally published, this is the shape the engagement takes: the records reconciliation settled before the content moves, a migration that can be re-run without republishing anything withdrawn, and the legacy addresses kept so published citations still have somewhere to land. The same engineering is available with AI-assisted delivery where it suits the work, at the same tested standard.

If you are replatforming a site whose documents are cited elsewhere, and nobody can yet tell you what happens to those citations, send us the address structure you have to keep.

When the website is the public record: a regulator's statutory publication channel

The Independent Pricing and Regulatory Tribunal(Opens in a new tab/window) is the New South Wales independent economic regulator. Its statutory work includes:

• setting the maximum prices for water, public transport and council rates
• licensing private water utilities
• running formal public reviews with consultation periods, submissions and hearings

Its website is not a brochure. It is the regulator's statutory publication channel, and a determination is published at the moment it appears there.

Councils, utilities and the lawyers who advise them cite that site, and those citations are expected to keep resolving for years. So the content cannot simply be copied across.

Every document has to arrive with its identity, its dates, its attachments and its editorial state intact, which makes a replatform a records problem long before it is a website problem.

Our part in the programme: migration architecture on GovCMS

Salsa Digital(Opens in a new tab/window) led the programme and brought us in as their engineering partner for the move onto GovCMS(Opens in a new tab/window), the Australian government's shared Drupal(Opens in a new tab/window) platform.

We worked across both properties, the regulator's main site and the second site for the energy savings scheme it administers. Our part covered:

• migration architecture
• platform development
• front-end engineering

Government delivery is rarely a single team. Several suppliers, the regulator's own developer and the platform operator all worked in the same codebase alongside the design and content teams, and keeping that shared build coherent was part of our work.

2 systems, a single set of documents: reconciling the records

The documents the site publishes did not live in the old website. They live in the regulator's enterprise records management system, held as formal records with their own numbers and revisions.

That left 2 sources describing the same material, each holding half the answer. The legacy site knew which document belonged to which review, in what order and on what date. The records system held the authoritative file.

The same document could also be known by 3 different identifiers, depending on which system you asked. So we built the reconciliation.

A single lookup resolves a document across all 3 and settles which wins, and anything the records system has not yet sent gets a placeholder, so a review can be assembled now and completed on the next sync.

A migration you can run more than once, without republishing withdrawn content

A migration this size is never a single run. You run it, review what landed, correct something, run it again, and that only works if the second run recognises what the first one created.

Legacy pages were known by their web addresses, so we derived each item's identifier from its own path: same path, same identifier, every run. Reviews that reference other reviews are built in a second pass. For a client, that is the difference between a migration you can correct and one you have to redo.

The decision we would lead with, though, is smaller and matters more. If an editor had unpublished a page, re-running the migration left it unpublished.

On a regulator's site that is not a nicety: a withdrawn determination that quietly reappears is a regulatory problem, not a content bug. And we proved the result rather than asserting it, comparing the source data against what actually landed in Drupal.

Where the regulator's publishing rules live: encoded in the site

Which documents appear under which tab of a review depends on the kind of review it is, and those rules belong to the regulator, so we encoded them in the site itself.

An editor publishes a document once, sees only the fields that apply to that review type, and it lands where the rules say it should. For a client, that means the complexity sits in the platform rather than in an editor's training.

The public gets a timeline that opens at today, and review pages offer an accessible copy of a document on request.

What it added up to: 73 releases, then 2 years of upgrades

The work began in 2020 and the build ran across 2021, released 73 times inside that single year. That is a release rhythm rather than a big-bang cutover, which is what most government teams are quietly hoping for.

The legacy address structure was kept wholesale, including the front page, so the addresses behind inbound links and published citations were preserved rather than replaced.

Then we handed it over, and it kept going: the team that received the platform carried on releasing and upgrading it through the next 2 years of Drupal work.

73 releases inside a single year, then 2 more years of upgrades by the team that received it.

For a migration, that is the outcome worth measuring. Not only that it landed, but that the next team could keep it moving.

For migrations where the content carries the risk

Everything on this page is 3 of our services on one government replatform: migration architecture across 2 sources of truth, platform development on a shared government Drupal platform, and front-end engineering that put the regulator's own publishing rules into the site.

If you run a regulator, a department or any site whose content is the public record, this is the shape the engagement takes: a migration you can re-run and correct, editorial decisions preserved across re-runs, and legacy addresses carried across rather than dropped. The same engineering is available with AI-assisted delivery where it suits the work, at the same tested standard.

If your next replatform has to carry documents that live in a records system rather than in the website, tell us where your documents actually live.

When the platform will not let you write code: the GovCMS SaaS constraint

If you publish on a government platform, you have probably met the trade it makes. GovCMS, the Australian Government's whole-of-government Drupal(Opens in a new tab/window) service, gives agencies accreditation, compliance and managed hosting. In return, its software-as-a-service tier permits no custom code:

• no bespoke modules
• no server-side services
• nothing outside the vetted distribution

It is easy to read that as a wall. Almost every hard requirement a team has met before was answered by writing code, and here that answer is gone.

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

A federal government department was moving its public web presence onto GovCMS, and its public channels carry the whole of what it does. A partner agency delivering that move brought us in as its engineering partner, with design carried by a separate studio.

We provided technical leadership, platform engineering and migration engineering:

• the scaffolding
• the content models
• the themes
• the deployment tooling
• the migration codebase itself

3 sites on one platform: a main channel, an intake site and a publication site

The engagement covered 3 sites on the same platform:

• the department's principal public channel, carrying reference information, publications, profiles, news, events and the programmes it funds
• a standalone public front door that takes structured reports from the public through a single intake form, live in 8 weeks
• a compact standalone publication site, shipped in 5 weeks alongside it

The main site's content model is built around the department's own subject matter, with its primary reference entities as first-class content rather than tags, so anything published can be placed against them.

Business logic that had to live in configuration: layout modifiers and design tokens

The most transferable piece is layout. Editors wanted per-section control over background images, gradients, colours, padding and height, at chosen breakpoints, so we modelled presentation as content.

Any component can carry any number of modifiers, each a small piece of content with its own media query, rendered as styling scoped to that component. An editor can combine a background image, extra top padding above tablet width and a minimum viewport height, without a developer and without code the platform would have refused. For a client, that reads as independence: your editors restyle a section themselves, and nobody has to ask first whether the platform will allow the code.

We took the same approach to the whole-of-government design system, re-theming it by assigning the department's design tokens into the system's own variables rather than overriding its output. Override the output and every release becomes a merge conflict. Assign tokens and it becomes a version bump.

We also restored the heading structure that paragraph-composed pages quietly lose, which screen readers rely on.

Moving 20 years of public content with no database to read

Roughly 20 years of published material had to move with the site: reference pages, publications, profiles, news releases and the document library behind them. There was no database to read and no API to call, so the source of record became the live public site, harvested and normalised into structured data.

That creates the problem any GovCMS team with a migration ahead of them is about to meet. A migration of this shape cannot be written without custom code, and the destination does not accept custom code. We resolved it architecturally: the migration ran as its own project on the platform-as-a-service tier, where custom code is permitted, and the content landed in the software-as-a-service site.

Archived material was treated as its own class throughout, because 20-year-old content does not have the shape of this morning's media release. And validation was written as configuration, committed beside the migration, so what landed could be checked against what was harvested.

Most migrations assert that they are correct. This one could be asked. For a client, that is the difference between being told a migration landed correctly and being able to check that it did.

What it adds up to: 10 months to build, 3 years of onward maintenance

The main site was built in about 10 months and went into service with 20 years of content behind it.

The measure we like most came later: it was still being maintained and upgraded 3 years after we handed it over, including a platform update and work toward a newer Drupal version, carried by the team that received it.

Built in 10 months, and still being maintained and upgraded 3 years after we handed it over.

A site still being improved by people who did not build it is solid evidence that it was built to be handed on.

For agencies that cannot ship custom code

Everything on this page is 5 of our services running inside one whole-of-government platform: architecture that puts the logic where the platform allows it, development of the content models and themes, the deployment tooling that ships them, migration engineering that could be checked against its source, and accessibility carried through the build.

If you publish on GovCMS software-as-a-service, or you are weighing a move onto it, this is the shape the engagement takes: requirements answered in configuration and theme rather than in modules you are not allowed to ship, a design system consumed by token assignment so an upgrade stays a version bump, and a migration that runs where custom code is permitted and lands where it is not. The same engineering is available with AI-assisted delivery where the work suits it, most obviously across migration mapping and validation.

If you have a requirement your GovCMS site will not let you build, tell us what it is and we will tell you where it can live.

GovCMS: when the platform will not let you write code

If you publish on a government platform, you have probably met the trade it makes. GovCMS(Opens in a new tab/window), the Australian Government's whole-of-government Drupal(Opens in a new tab/window) service, gives agencies accreditation, compliance and managed hosting.

In return, its software-as-a-service tier permits no custom code: no bespoke modules, no server-side services, nothing outside the vetted distribution.

It is easy to read that as a wall. Almost every hard requirement a team has met before was answered by writing code, and here that answer is gone.

Our part in the work: technical leadership and migration engineering with Salsa Digital

The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade runs Australia's international relations, trade policy, development assistance and consular services, and its public web presence carries all of it. Salsa Digital(Opens in a new tab/window), delivering the move onto GovCMS, brought us in as its engineering partner, with design carried by a separate studio.

We provided technical leadership, platform engineering and migration engineering:

• the project scaffolding and the deployment tooling
• the content models behind all 3 sites
• the themes, including the design-system work
• the migration codebase itself

3 GovCMS sites for a department with a global remit

The department's public presence was built as 3 sites.

• the corporate site, its main public channel, carrying country and regional information, publications, profiles, news, events and the programmes it funds
• tradebarriers.gov.au, the national front door where Australian exporters report the obstacles they meet in overseas markets that are not tariffs: quarantine rules, labelling requirements, customs delays. It takes reports through a single structured intake form, and was live in 8 weeks
• a site for the Cairns Group, the coalition of agricultural exporting nations chaired by Australia, shipped in 5 weeks

The corporate site's content model is shaped like a foreign ministry, with country pages as first-class content rather than tags, so anything published can be placed geographically.

Business logic that had to live in configuration: layout modifiers and design tokens

The most transferable piece is layout. Editors wanted per-section control over background images, gradients, colours, padding and height, at chosen breakpoints, so we modelled presentation as content.

Any component can carry any number of modifiers, each a small piece of content with its own media query, rendered as styling scoped to that component. An editor can combine a background image, extra top padding above tablet width and a minimum viewport height, without a developer and without code the platform would have refused. For a client, that reads as independence: your editors change how a page looks without booking developer time.

We took the same approach to the Australian Government Design System, re-theming it by assigning the department's design tokens into the system's own variables rather than overriding its output. Override the output and every release becomes a merge conflict. Assign tokens and it becomes a version bump.

We also restored the heading structure that paragraph-composed pages quietly lose, which screen readers rely on.

Moving 20 years of public content: a migration built where custom code is allowed

Roughly 20 years of published material had to move with the site: country pages, publications, profiles, news releases and the document library behind them. There was no database to read and no API to call, so the source of record became the live public site, harvested and normalised into structured data.

That creates the problem any GovCMS team with a migration ahead of them is about to meet. A migration of this shape cannot be written without custom code, and the destination does not accept custom code.

We resolved it architecturally: the migration ran as its own project on the platform-as-a-service tier, where custom code is permitted, and the content landed in the software-as-a-service site.

Archived material was treated as its own class throughout, because 20-year-old content does not have the shape of this morning's media release.

Validation was written as configuration, committed beside the migration, so what landed could be checked against what was harvested. Most migrations assert that they are correct. This one could be asked.

For a client, that is the difference between trusting a migration and being able to check it.

What it adds up to: 10 months to build, still maintained 3 years on

The main site was built in about 10 months and went into service with 20 years of content behind it.

The measure we like most came later: it was still being maintained and upgraded 3 years after we handed it over, including a platform update and work toward a newer Drupal version, carried by the team that received it.

Built in about 10 months with 20 years of content behind it, and still being upgraded 3 years after handover.

A site still being improved by people who did not build it is strong evidence that it was built to be handed on.

For teams publishing inside a platform they cannot extend

Everything on this page is 5 of our services running inside a platform that permits no custom code: architecture that puts business logic in configuration, development within a vetted distribution, migration at 20-year scale, DevOps and hosting through the platform's own tooling, and accessibility work carried in the theme.

If you publish on GovCMS, or on any accredited government platform that fixes what you are allowed to build, this is the shape the engagement takes: presentation modelled as content so editors keep control, design-system work done by assigning tokens rather than overriding output, and a migration that can be checked rather than trusted. The same engineering is available with AI-assisted delivery where it suits the work.

If your GovCMS build has a requirement the software-as-a-service tier will not let you code your way out of, tell us what the platform is blocking.

The GovCMS foundation dozens of government websites stand on

GovCMS(Opens in a new tab/window) is the Australian Government's shared Drupal(Opens in a new tab/window) platform, run by the Department of Finance. Agencies across federal, state and local government build their websites on it and get security, compliance and managed hosting in return for working inside the platform's rules. It is common ground under a large part of the Australian government web estate.

Working on a platform like that is a different kind of work from building one agency's website. A decision you make on an agency site shapes that site.

A decision you embed in the platform's own tooling shapes every project started from it afterwards, for years. That is where we spent 2018 to 2020.

What a project scaffold actually decides

Every new site on a shared platform starts from a scaffold: a project template that arrives with the platform's opinions already made.

• how the project is laid out and how its dependencies are managed
• how a developer runs it on their own machine
• what the automated checks look at before a change is allowed through
• what the platform will simply refuse to deploy

Most people never see this layer, which is exactly why it matters. Get it right and every team starting a project inherits a safe, tested path to production without having to think about it. Get it wrong and every team inherits the same friction, one project at a time.

What we contributed to the GovCMS scaffolds

We were the leading contributor to 2 of the platform's project scaffolds, govcms7-scaffold and saas-scaffold, and to the continuous integration that runs alongside them. We also contributed to:

• the platform's hosting integration on Lagoon
• its shared CI tooling and provisioning automation
• its Drupal 8 distribution and the platform's own website
• 2 of its content-safety modules

It is worth being precise about what that means. This is contribution, not stewardship. The platform belongs to the Department of Finance and its direction always has.

What the public record shows is that across roughly 3 years we were the leading contributor to the templates every consuming project starts from. The repositories are open source, so anyone can check that for themselves, which is the whole reason it is worth saying.

Scaffold design: opinionated and generic at the same time

A platform scaffold has to pull in two directions at once. It has to be opinionated enough to be genuinely useful, so that a team gets a working, tested project on day one. And it has to be generic enough to serve every agency on the platform, from a small statutory body to a large department.

Then there is the boundary. Some files belong to the project and some belong to the platform, and a project that edits the wrong one cannot deploy at all. That is why these scaffolds carry an explicit list of files a project must leave alone.

Drawing that line, between what a team may change and what the platform owns, is the central design problem of this kind of work. It is the difference between a template teams trust and one they quietly fight.

The same problem, solved twice: GovCMS and Vortex

In the same period we were answering the identical question in our own practice. Our open-source Drupal project template, Vortex(Opens in a new tab/window), grew out of it: how do you give every project a build, test and deploy path that is standard enough to maintain and flexible enough to be worth using?

Doing both at once meant each one informed the other. It is also a fair answer to a question we are asked often, which is why anyone should trust our project template. Because we did the same job inside a federal government platform, in public, where the result can be read.

What it added up to: platform foundations we later built on

The scaffolds shipped and were used. Government agency websites were built from them, including several we went on to deliver ourselves.

Across roughly 3 years, the leading contributor to the project templates every GovCMS site starts from, in repositories anyone can read.

Contributing to a platform's foundations and then delivering agency sites on top of those foundations is an unusual combination. For an agency choosing a partner on the platform, the practical difference is a team that knows which files the platform owns before the first deploy fails.

None of it is locked away, either. The platform's tooling is open source, so the work is there to read.

For agencies building on GovCMS

The work on this page sits behind 3 of our services: platform architecture, Drupal development, and the DevOps and hosting engineering that decides how sites reach production.

If you run an agency site on GovCMS, or you are choosing between SaaS and PaaS for your next build, this is the practical advantage: we contributed to the templates your project will start from, so the platform's rules are not a surprise to us. The same engineering is available with AI-assisted delivery where it suits the work, at the same tested standard.

If a GovCMS build or migration is on your roadmap, tell us where it stands.