At OctoHaus we've been building on Drupal for more than 15 years, through Drupal 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 and now Drupal 11. We design content platforms, headless backends, and Drupal Commerce storefronts for organisations that need their digital infrastructure to be reliable, secure, and still standing a decade from now.
Drupal isn't a drag-and-drop website builder. It's a content framework: entities, fields, revisions, translations, granular permissions. That's exactly why we reach for it when a project has structure, scale, or long-term editorial complexity behind it.
Drupal is an open-source content management framework written in PHP, first released in 2001 and maintained today by a global community around drupal.org. It's particularly well-suited to projects where the content model is genuinely complex: many content types, editorial workflows, multiple languages, role-based access, or a need to expose structured content to multiple channels.
You'll find Drupal powering a large share of the world's public-sector and institutional web, including sites for governments, universities, international NGOs, major media publishers, cultural institutions, and global enterprises. Organisations like the Australian Government, the European Commission, NASA, Tesla, Stanford University, The Economist, and the Grammy Awards have all shipped on Drupal, typically because they needed the combination of editorial rigour, accessibility, multilingual support, and long-term maintainability that Drupal is built around.
Multilingual portals, accessibility compliance, strict security and audit requirements.
Universities running hundreds of sites, faculties and departments from a single platform.
High-traffic editorial platforms with complex taxonomies, workflows, and content moderation.
Multi-site, multi-brand, multi-region platforms built on a shared content model.
Drupal Commerce for content-led commerce, B2B catalogues, and multilingual storefronts.
Drupal as a backend serving Next.js, Nuxt, native apps, and other channels via JSON:API.
Our Drupal work falls into a few clear areas. Every project draws from several of them; the split below is how we think about capability, not how we price projects.
When editors, content governance, and frontend delivery should live under one roof, we build traditional Drupal sites: modern theming, Layout Builder, Paragraphs, and carefully designed content models that editors actually enjoy working with.
Not every project needs to be headless. Sometimes the right answer is a well-built Drupal site, and we'll tell you when that's the case.
When the frontend demands a different stack (Next.js, Nuxt, or native mobile), we run Drupal as a headless backend and serve content through JSON:API or GraphQL. We work with tools like next-drupal, design cache and revalidation strategies, and keep the editorial experience intact on the Drupal side.
The goal is always the same: editors keep their Drupal, users get a frontend that loads in milliseconds.
We build e-commerce platforms on Drupal Commerce 2 where content and commerce share a content model: publishers with paywalls, B2B catalogues with complex product hierarchies, multilingual storefronts, and commerce sites that need the same editorial rigour as the rest of the stack.
Where contributed modules end, we write clean, coding-standards-compliant custom modules: services, event subscribers, plugin types, queue workers, Drush commands, and custom entity types when the content model calls for it.
We also contribute modules back to drupal.org and maintain them through the official security advisory process.
Drupal 7 to Drupal 10/11 is a big part of what we do. We use the Migrate API, treat migrations as an opportunity to re-architect the content model properly rather than carrying forward legacy debt, and plan cutovers in increments instead of big-bang launches.
We also migrate from foreign systems, including WordPress, legacy PHP apps, custom CMSes, and static exports, into Drupal.
Render caching, Dynamic Page Cache, BigPipe, Varnish, CDN rules, image style strategy, Search API with Solr or Typesense for fast listings, database right-sizing on AWS RDS, and careful work on hot-path queries.
Our baseline assumption is that a Drupal site should be fast by default and still be fast under real traffic, not just on the dev machine.
We track drupal.org security advisories, patch inside tight SLAs, and design permission models carefully.
Our own JSON:API Advanced Permissions module (below) exists precisely because we kept running into the same access-control gaps on large headless builds.
Drupal platforms are meant to last. We provide ongoing SLA support with weekly security updates, quarterly core upgrades, and proactive PHP and database version planning, so that "upgrade Drupal 10 to 11" never becomes a panic project.
Being part of the Drupal community isn't a marketing line for us. It's how we work. When we solve a problem that keeps reappearing across projects, we package it as a contributed module, publish it to drupal.org, take it through the security advisory review, and maintain it across Drupal versions.
A Drush-based utility that exports a Drupal site's entity types, bundles, and field configuration as structured JSON. The output gives large language models and AI coding assistants an accurate, machine-readable picture of the site's content model, useful for AI-assisted module development, headless frontend type scaffolding, and onboarding developers to large Drupal codebases.
Extends Drupal core's JSON:API module with a finer-grained permission layer for headless and decoupled projects: per-resource and per-operation access control that goes beyond what core JSON:API exposes out of the box. Built to fix real access-control gaps we kept hitting on large headless Drupal builds.
Beyond the modules we build and maintain ourselves, we contribute improvements and integrations to community projects across the Drupal ecosystem.
Payment gateway integration for Drupal Commerce, enabling Craftgate, a leading Turkish payment infrastructure provider, as a payment option on Drupal Commerce storefronts. We contributed the initial implementation and maintain compatibility with current Drupal Commerce releases.
The reason our Drupal sites hold up in year three and year five is that we treat architecture as the main deliverable of the discovery phase. Content model, cache topology, permission model, integration boundaries, and deployment pipeline are all decided before the first feature ticket. Once those foundations are right, everything downstream, from performance and security to editor experience and future migrations, becomes a normal engineering problem instead of a firefight.
We also say no to Drupal when it's the wrong tool. For a three-page marketing site or a single-product landing page, Drupal is overkill and we'll tell you so. Our practice exists for the class of problem Drupal is genuinely best at, and we've been doing that long enough to know the difference.
Yes. The choice is per-project and sometimes per-section. We run Drupal as a traditional monolithic CMS when editors and frontend should live together, as a fully headless backend serving Next.js or Nuxt when performance and frontend developer experience matter most, and as a hybrid when only parts of the site need to be decoupled.
Yes. Drupal 7 to Drupal 10 or 11 migrations are a core specialty. We use the Migrate API, rebuild the content model properly instead of carrying over years of legacy debt, and plan migrations as re-architecture opportunities. For sites that are not ready to migrate yet, we also support Drupal 7 sites in maintenance mode while a migration plan is scoped.
We build on Drupal Commerce 2 when commerce and content share a content model: content-led commerce, B2B catalogues with complex product hierarchies, multilingual storefronts, and commerce that needs the same rigour as the rest of the platform.
Yes. We maintain contributed modules on drupal.org, including AI Schema (content model export for LLMs) and JSON:API Advanced Permissions (finer-grained access control for headless Drupal). Both go through drupal.org official review and security advisory process, and we keep them current across Drupal core versions.
Performance starts at architecture. We design cache topology early: render cache, Dynamic Page Cache, BigPipe, Varnish or CDN rules, and Search API-backed listings instead of expensive Views when it matters. Then we audit: real-world Lighthouse and server-side profiling, database right-sizing, image style discipline, and hot-path query work. Fast by default, still fast under traffic.
We track drupal.org security advisories, patch production inside tight SLAs, and design permission models carefully from day one: fine-grained per-entity and per-field access, private file access control, hardened JSON:API surfaces, and sensible role design. Our own JSON:API Advanced Permissions module exists specifically to close the access-control gaps we kept seeing on large headless builds.
Drupal 10 and Drupal 11 for all new builds. Drupal 9 is end-of-life and we only touch it to migrate away from it. Drupal 7 we support in maintenance mode while a migration is planned.
Both. A large part of our practice is ongoing maintenance for Drupal platforms originally built by us or by other teams. Weekly security updates, monthly module audits, quarterly core upgrades, and proactive planning for PHP and database version transitions.
Whether it's a new build, a migration, or a site that needs to be made fast and safe again. Let's talk.
Book a free intro callOctoHaus is a Turkey-based software agency focused on digital products and e-commerce solutions. With an experienced team, we build custom web applications, e-commerce platforms, and integrations using Drupal, Laravel, Reactjs, Vuejs, and other modern web technologies, along with ongoing maintenance and support services.
We design reliable, scalable, and high-performance digital infrastructures for businesses, delivering solutions that prioritize user experience, performance, and long-term sustainability.