Drupal
The enterprise CMS for complex content workflows, multi-site management, and headless API delivery. Built on PHP with a modular architecture.
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Enterprise content, open source
Drupal earns its place where content is structurally complex: content types with editorial workflow, fine-grained permissions, dozens of sites run from one codebase, and multilingual publishing handled in core rather than through add-ons. Adaca's Drupal work is extension, integration and upkeep: custom modules, decoupled front ends, connections to surrounding systems, and the patching that keeps a platform current.
Modern Drupal is built on Symfony components and object-oriented PHP, so module work is conventional software engineering with the whole platform's source open to read. JSON:API in core, with GraphQL available, lets Drupal serve as the content backend for React or Next.js front ends while editors keep Drupal's workflow and preview tooling.
Drupal is the wrong choice for a simple marketing site, where a lighter CMS or a static Next.js build costs far less to run, and for applications whose core is not content. A booking engine or an operations tool forced into nodes and views fights the platform's data model; software like that is better built as a custom system, with Drupal kept for the content beside it.
- Government Portals
- University Sites
- Enterprise CMS
- Multi-Site Management
Our Drupal capabilities
Enterprise CMS
Content modelling turns an organisation's publishing reality into content types, fields, moderation states and role-based permissions that editors can work within. On multi-site estates, one codebase serves many sites, with configuration management keeping every environment reproducible so a change tested on one site rolls out predictably across the rest.
- Content modelling
- Workflows
- Multi-site
Headless Drupal
Drupal serves structured content over JSON:API or GraphQL to React and Next.js front ends, so the editorial tooling and the rendering layer can evolve separately. The design work sits in the content model and the cache strategy: previews, scheduled publishing and cache invalidation all need deliberate wiring once the front end no longer lives inside Drupal.
- JSON:API
- GraphQL
- Decoupled
Module development
Custom modules extend Drupal through its plugin system, hooks and services, following core conventions so they survive minor-version updates. Most module work is integration: single sign-on, search, CRM and data feeds connected behind the content layer, with contributed modules preferred wherever one already does the job.
- Custom modules
- Themes
- Plugin API
Why Adaca for Drupal?
Drupal core expertise
Entity system, plugin architecture, and configuration management.
Enterprise content strategy
Content architectures for complex editorial workflows and multi-site deployments.
Headless & decoupled
Modern front-ends powered by Drupal's content API.
Security & compliance
Regular updates, patches, and compliance monitoring for enterprise environments.
Migration experience
Migration from legacy CMS platforms to modern Drupal with minimal disruption.
Accessibility & i18n
WCAG-compliant themes and full multilingual support.
How We Staff It
Drupal engineers at Adaca are PHP engineers first, which matters because modern Drupal work is Symfony-style engineering as much as site building. A typical engagement fields one engineer across modules, configuration and integrations, adding front-end capacity when the build is decoupled.
Engagements run in your repositories and your deployment pipeline, with engineers working to your day.
Common Questions
Should we run Drupal headless or use its theming layer?
Twig theming suits a site that is mostly Drupal: one system to run, previews and layout tools that work as shipped, and no second application to host. Headless suits an organisation whose front end is already React or Next.js, or that feeds several channels from the same content, at the cost of rebuilding preview and routing wiring the theme layer provides.
The content model transfers either way, so the choice can be revisited without repeating the modelling work.
We are still on Drupal 7, what should we do?
Drupal 7 reached end of life in January 2025, so its core no longer receives security updates. Moving off it is a rebuild rather than an upgrade: the architecture changed completely at Drupal 8, so content migrates through the migrate APIs while themes and custom modules are rewritten against the modern platform.
The realistic decision is scope. A content-heavy site with modest custom code moves cleanly; a Drupal 7 site that grew into an application is worth re-examining first, because some of what it does may belong in custom software rather than in the new CMS.
How well does Drupal suit AI-assisted development?
Better than closed platforms, for a structural reason: Drupal core, its contributed modules and years of public issue queues are all open source, so the training corpus reaches into the platform itself rather than stopping at its documentation. Agents still stumble on Drupal's own idioms, render arrays, hooks and configuration entities, more than on the Symfony-style PHP beneath them.
PHPUnit coverage and configuration held in code give agent-written changes something to be checked against. The measured results of our AI-augmented delivery flow are on the Technology page.
Can you take over a Drupal platform another team built?
Yes. A takeover starts with an audit: core and module versions against supported releases, configuration drift between environments, and any core or contributed code that has been patched locally. From there the work settles into a maintenance cadence of updates, security patches and small features.
Terms are three, six, nine or twelve months, chosen up front, and the engagement can start at a single engineer.