Preferred toolkit

Whenever possible, we use our preferred toolkit for all client work. This is a set of tried and tested tools that we know well. Focusing on a small set of tools allows to be more productive and avoids spreading ourselves to thinly over a wide variety of technologies. There is less for our staff to learn and keep up to date with, which makes development and support easier and quicker.

Our preferred toolkit is constantly evolving in response to new things that we learn about and design and build ourselves.

We have a preferred toolkit that consists of tried and tested tools that we know inside out, and we know work well for our clients.

The aim of the toolkit is to allow us to deliver the maximum value for money for out clients.

We use our preferred toolkit whenever possible and practical and we try and do as much client work as possible with just the preferred toolkit.

We prefer tools that will be maintained long term. Typically this means that they have a large community around them.

We want them to be popular and well known with our clients so that it is easy for them to use them.

We strongly discourage custom (or 'bespoke') code that is written specifically for an individual client. Custom code is expensive to write and to maintain and more often than not ends up as more trouble that it is worth.

That all said, there are times when we want to do things that are not possible with the preferred toolkit. If the business case is there, i.e. if we think it will meet multiple client needs and if the resources are available to develop and maintain the software, we will consider developing new software that we can add to the toolkit. See Research and Development for more on this.

Our current choice of tools is:

• WordPress for content management
• CiviCRM for CRM
• Vue for frontend development
• Docker for infrastructure management
• AWS SES for email delivery
• Stripe for card payments
• GoCardless for direct debit