Lagoon

The question a site answers before anything else: which environment is this?

A surprising amount of what a website does depends on knowing where it is running:

• debug output belongs on a developer's machine and nowhere near the public site
• caching should be aggressive in production and out of the way while someone is working
• sample content and test users are useful in a throwaway preview build and unwelcome anywhere else
• emails should only reach real customers from the real site

So every project asks the same question early in its startup: what kind of environment is this?

The awkward part is that each hosting platform answers it differently, with its own signals and its own vocabulary for its tiers, so the environment a team integrates in goes by a different name on each one.

The result is familiar. Each project grows its own small block of detection code, written fresh, a little different from the last one.

It holds up until a platform adds a tier or a project gains an environment that block was never told about. Then the site behaves as though it were somewhere else, in the one place where being wrong is expensive.

One call, nothing to configure: 6 environment types

environment-detector(Opens in a new tab/window) answers the question in a single call, with no setup. It resolves the environment to one of 6 types:

• local
• CI (an automated build)
• development
• preview
• stage
• production

Everything else in the codebase simply branches on the answer.

It recognises where that code is running:

• the hosting platforms teams actually run on: Acquia, Lagoon, Pantheon, Platform.sh, Skpr and Tugboat
• the automated build systems where the same code also runs: GitHub Actions, GitLab CI and CircleCI
• what it is sitting in underneath: a plain machine, a container, or a local development tool such as DDEV or Lando

Telling a preview apart from development is worth more than it sounds. A short-lived environment built for a single change is not the shared space a team integrates in, and once the difference is visible in code, the settings that follow can finally be right.

For a client, that reads as a preview link that behaves like a preview, and a production site that behaves like production.

Built so a wrong answer is loud: it stops instead of guessing

A detector is only worth having if you can trust it, so the design prefers certainty over cleverness.

A single hosting platform can be active at a time. If 2 announce themselves at once, that is a genuine misconfiguration rather than a riddle to solve, so the library stops instead of guessing.

When a platform is active but cannot place an environment in a tier it recognises, the fallback leans the safe way, towards a shared development environment, and it does not downgrade a platform already known to be production.

There are 2 failures worth engineering against: local settings reaching the live site, and production settings reaching a laptop. The design guards against both rather than relying on everyone remembering.

For a client, that reads as one less way for a site to misbehave after a deploy: debug output, caching and test data follow the environment the code landed in.

One line in a Drupal settings file, and a plain call anywhere in PHP

For Drupal(Opens in a new tab/window) the integration is a single line in the site's settings file. That line works out the environment and applies the settings that belong with it, so trusted hosts, file paths and caching are correct wherever the code has landed, with no per-project block to maintain.

Outside Drupal it works through a plain call in any PHP application. It is also built to be extended, with the same pieces the built-in platforms and frameworks use.

Drupal is the framework integration that ships today, and the model underneath it was designed to be framework-agnostic from the start.

Why we keep it public: shipped in Vortex, free to adopt

Solving this once is the entire argument. It ships as part of Vortex(Opens in a new tab/window), our open-source Drupal project template, so every project we start already knows where it is running, and supporting a new host becomes a package update rather than an edit in every codebase.

One call, 6 environment types, and the same answer on every supported host.

It is open source and free to use, published on GitHub(Opens in a new tab/window), so any team can adopt it without ever speaking to us. That is deliberate.

This is unglamorous plumbing, it is the same in every project, and no budget should be paying to write it a second time.

When we take on a platform, that habit comes with us: the generic parts are already solved, so the effort goes where your platform is actually different.

For teams whose environment logic is hand-written in every project

Everything on this page is 2 of our services pointed at our own tooling: the development of the library itself, and the ongoing support and maintenance that keeps it current as hosting platforms change. The same standard applies to our AI-assisted delivery: whatever writes the change, the environment it lands in is decided by one tested library rather than by a block of code copied between projects.

If you run a Drupal or PHP platform whose settings file carries its own environment logic, or a team working across several hosts that each name their tiers differently, this is the shape the engagement takes. The detection moves into one tested library, the per-environment settings follow from it, and adding a host later is a version bump instead of an edit in every repository.

If nobody on your team can say for certain what your production site would do on the day it decided it was staging, send us your settings file.

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.

What you push is what production runs: deploying from a git branch

A good deal of hosting still works the simplest way there is. You push to a git branch, the platform notices, and it deploys whatever it finds there. It is a clean model, and it puts an awkward requirement on your repository.

Your repository is not what production needs. It carries the parts a team builds with:

• development tooling
• test suites
• source assets
• build configuration

What it does not carry is the compiled CSS, installed dependencies and vendor code the running site depends on. Something has to bridge that gap, and for most teams that something is a deployment script written once, under time pressure, and then trusted forever.

That step is worth thinking about carefully, because of everything in a pipeline it is the one that can fail quietly.

A build that breaks stops the pipeline and tells you. A deployment that publishes the wrong contents raises nothing at all. It simply goes live.

A deployment step designed to refuse: dry runs, no-change guards and tag collisions

git-artifact(Opens in a new tab/window) builds the deployable artifact inside CI and commits only that to the separate repository your host watches. Development tooling stays out of the deployed package, which keeps the running site lean and narrows what is exposed there.

The part we care about most is what it does when something is not right. It refuses in 3 independent ways, each covering a different way a deployment can go wrong without anyone noticing:

• pushing is a dry run unless you explicitly ask for a deploy, so the default invocation prints what it would do and writes nothing to the remote
• if the artifact it has just built is identical to what is already deployed and no new tags are involved, it stops rather than adding noise to the history
• if a tag would collide with one already on the destination, it stops there too

For a client, that reads as a deployment that stops rather than guesses: when something does not look right, the pipeline says so instead of publishing quietly.

Underneath those refusals sits the ordinary work of getting an artifact right:

• a manifest controls exactly what goes in
• a watermark in each commit message lets the tool find where it left off on a repository it does not own, which is what makes incremental artifact builds possible at all
• tags are carried across with collision detection
• symlinks survive the copy instead of being flattened into broken files

All of it was built test first, against a suite that provisions real throwaway git repositories rather than mocking them. Testing a deployment tool that way is slow and awkward. It is also the only way to know the safety rails actually fire.

Where it came from: a 2017 client audit, extracted as open source

git-artifact started inside client work. In 2017 we were auditing a dual-sector university's TAFE website platform, and we rebuilt its deployment step from the ground up: written test first in PHP, with the refusals above and a test suite that exercised every one of them.

2 years later, we did the part that mattered more. We lifted it out of the client's codebase and published it as a standalone open-source package, so every project after it inherited the same tested deployment step at no cost to anyone.

That is a habit rather than a one-off. When client work produces a piece of engineering that is better than that one project strictly needed, we take it out, publish it and maintain it. git-artifact is the earliest example and still the clearest one.

For a client, that habit reads as inherited engineering: the deployment step on your platform arrives already built, already tested and already maintained, rather than written fresh under time pressure.

Still deploying, 9 years on: Vortex, Acquia Cloud and Lagoon

git-artifact is maintained and in service 9 years after the first version and 7 after it became a package. It ships with Vortex(Opens in a new tab/window), our open-source Drupal(Opens in a new tab/window) project template, and it is the deployment mechanism for Vortex-based projects on git-deployed hosting, including Acquia Cloud and Lagoon.

9 years in service, 7 of them as an open-source package other projects inherit.

For a tool whose whole job is to say no at the right moments, longevity is the measure that counts. It has been doing the same careful thing in other people's pipelines for the better part of a decade, and the teams using it rarely have to think about it.

For pipelines whose deploy step nobody has read

Everything on this page is 4 of our services pointed at our own tooling: the architecture of a deployment step, the development of the package that implements it, the DevOps engineering it exists to protect, and the ongoing support and maintenance that has kept it current since 2017. It is the same rule we apply to AI-assisted delivery: however quickly a change is written, it reaches production through a deployment step that has been tested.

If you run a site deployed from a git branch, on hosting like Acquia Cloud or Lagoon, and the step that gets your build there is a script somebody wrote once, this is the shape the engagement takes. The deploy step becomes a tested, maintained package: a dry run by default, a refusal when something does not look right, and only the built site in front of your visitors.

If nobody on your team can say what your pipeline actually pushes to production, show us your deploy 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 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.

Publishing the data is the easy half: what an open data portal needs after the files

If your organisation publishes data for the public to reuse, hosting the files is rarely what makes it hard. A spreadsheet on a server is a solved problem. The interesting questions all start after publication.

The same 3 questions come up on every portal.

• Someone needs a dataset you have not released yet. How do they ask, and how does anyone else see that the request was made?
• Someone spots an error in a column, or cannot work out how a figure was calculated. Where does that go, and does it end up attached to the data or lost in a generic contact form?
• A developer weighing up whether to build on your data has to judge, before investing any time, whether it is well maintained and licensed for their purpose.

Each of those is a real product problem, and none of them is solved by publishing more files.

Queensland's open data portal: CKAN and the extensions a government adds to it

The Queensland Government's open data portal, at data.qld.gov.au, publishes state datasets for public reuse. It is the practical expression of open data policy: anyone can find, download and reuse what a government agency holds, under a licence that permits it. Its readers are the public, journalists, researchers and businesses building products on public data, alongside the agency staff publishing it.

It runs on CKAN, the open-source data portal platform behind many national and state open data sites around the world. CKAN handles the catalogue itself. Everything a particular government needs on top of that is an extension, and Queensland maintains its extensions as public repositories anyone can read.

Alongside the portal sits the Queensland business services catalogue, the directory of services government offers to businesses. That one is Drupal(Opens in a new tab/window).

Our contribution, in the open: public CKAN repositories and a Drupal catalogue build

Between 2019 and 2021, engaged through Salsa Digital(Opens in a new tab/window), we contributed to the CKAN extensions behind the portal:

• the Queensland-specific behaviour that shapes the portal itself
• its theme
• the extensions that answer those 3 questions directly

Our changes sit alongside those of a much wider group of contributors, in repositories the Queensland Government owns and publishes itself.

That is a different working posture from a private client repository. Changes are visible, attributable and reviewed in public, by a community that did not hire you and has no particular reason to be polite about it. For a client, that posture reads as verifiable work: you can read the changes we made without taking our word for any of it.

Contributing successfully in that setting, in Python and CKAN rather than the PHP and Drupal we work in most days, is a credential in its own right.

On the business services catalogue we carried more of the load. We were the leading contributor to its Drupal build.

The 3 problems open data publishers keep hitting: requests, comments and certification

The extensions we worked on are worth understanding even if you never run CKAN: they are well-considered answers to the 3 questions above.

• Data requests turn a portal from one-way publishing into a demand signal. The public asks for datasets that have not been released, in the open, so agencies can see what people actually want rather than guessing at it.
• Dataset comments give quality feedback a home. A threaded discussion attached to the data itself means an error report or a methodology question lands where the next reader will see it.
• Third-party certification is the trust signal. Open Data Institute certificates rate a dataset's quality, licensing and sustainability against a published standard, so a developer can judge it without having to ask anyone.

Most organisations that publish data publicly run into the same 3 problems: a council, a regulator, a research body, a university. CKAN's answers to them are a useful reference even when the build in front of you is Drupal. For a client, that reads as time saved: the hard questions are already named, so a portal project starts at your own data rather than at first principles.

What the work left us with: maintained extensions and a second platform ecosystem

The portal is live, and the extensions are public, active and still maintained by the Queensland Government. For work of this shape that is the outcome that matters: the code stayed in service and other people kept building on it.

The extensions we contributed to between 2019 and 2021 are still public, active and maintained by the government that owns them.

For us it settled a question clients ask often. CKAN is Python, with its own community, its own extension model and its own deployment shape. Merged contributions in it answer "can you work outside Drupal?" concretely rather than with an assurance.

It also left us with a working understanding of open data as a domain. Those 3 problems are the first things we raise when a client tells us they are about to start publishing.

For organisations opening their data to the public

Everything on this page is one of our services in an unfamiliar setting: development, carried out in public repositories a state government owns, in Python and CKAN alongside the Drupal we work in most days.

If you run a council, a regulator, a research body or a university about to publish data for the public to reuse, this is the shape the engagement takes: the 3 questions answered before the build starts, work done in whatever ecosystem your portal already runs on, and changes anyone can read. The same engineering is available with AI-assisted delivery where it suits the work, at the same tested standard.

If you are standing up an open data portal, or running one where the datasets go out and nothing comes back, tell us what you publish and who needs it.

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.