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.