CMS Development & Customisation
Content management system work across WordPress, Joomla, Drupal and custom builds — choosing one, extending one, or moving between them.
Who this is for
Organisations deciding which CMS to adopt, teams whose current CMS no longer fits, and anyone who has inherited a CMS nobody currently understands.
What you get
- CMS selection with written reasoning against your actual requirements
- Build and customisation on the chosen platform
- Custom modules, plugins, components and themes where nothing suitable exists
- Migration between systems, with URLs and content structure preserved
- Content modelling — the structure your content needs, before it is built
- Editor training so publishing does not need a developer
What this does not include
- Commercial licences for themes, plugins or extensions, billed at cost
- Content writing and migration data cleansing, quoted separately
- Hosting, unless bought separately
What a CMS is for
A content management system exists so that the people who own the content can change it without the people who own the code. Everything else — templates, plugins, workflow — supports that.
If your site needs a developer every time a phone number changes, the CMS is not doing its job.
Choosing between systems
There is no best CMS, only a best fit for a set of requirements. The questions that actually decide it:
- Who edits, and how technical are they? This matters more than any feature.
- How structured is the content? Pages, or records with relationships?
- What must it integrate with?
- Who maintains it in three years? A large talent pool is a real advantage.
- What is the cost of being wrong? Some choices are cheap to reverse.
We have written up the comparison in detail on a separate page rather than compressing it here.
Migration between systems
Moving CMS is mostly a content-structure problem. The prose moves easily; the difficulty is mapping one system’s model onto another’s, and keeping every URL working afterwards.
Both are scoped as part of the project rather than discovered during it.
On building a custom CMS
Occasionally justified, usually not. A custom CMS is a permanent maintenance obligation and it narrows the set of people who can ever work on your site. We will build one where the requirement genuinely demands it, and we will argue against it first.
Frequently asked questions
How do we choose a CMS?
From requirements, not popularity. Who edits content and how technical are they? How structured is the content? What has to integrate? What happens if your supplier changes? We have a page that walks through the comparison.
Can you move us from one CMS to another?
Yes. The content usually moves cleanly; the effort is in mapping content structure and preserving URLs. Both are part of the project.
What if our CMS is heavily customised and nobody knows how?
That is common. We audit what is there — versions, customisations, dependencies — and produce an honest picture before recommending anything.
Should we build a custom CMS?
Almost never. It is a maintenance obligation that outlives the project and shrinks the pool of people who can work on it. There are genuine exceptions, but the burden of proof sits with the custom option.
Last reviewed 2026-08-30 by Rajesh.
Talk to us about CMS Development & Customisation
Tell us the goal and we will scope it properly.