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.