Global Corporate CMS

Overview

An in-house CMS built to serve every corporate site in the group from one place. Rather than a single monolithic admin, it is fourteen modules that compose: page and component builders, a file manager, header/footer/menu management, product and content administration, user and role management, and the access control that ties them together.

The problem

The real constraint was not the editor — it was the gap between what marketing teams wanted to change and what required an engineer. Every copy tweak, every new landing page, every menu reorder was arriving as a ticket. A generic page builder solves that badly: give editors unlimited freedom and the corporate sites drift out of brand within a quarter, give them none and they are back to filing tickets. The system had to be expressive enough to build real pages and constrained enough that the output still looks like it belongs to the same company.

Approach

• Modelled pages as compositions of a fixed component catalogue rather than free-form HTML — editors arrange and configure approved components, so the output cannot drift off-brand.
• Each component declares its own schema, and the builder renders the editing form from that schema. Adding a new component type means shipping one definition, not touching the builder.
• Built role-based access control as a first-class module rather than a flag on the user record, so a reviewer, an editor and an administrator genuinely see different systems.
• Separated the file manager into its own module with shared upload and reference semantics, so every other module points at the same asset store instead of each rolling its own.
• Kept the 14 modules independently navigable and independently permissioned, so a team that only manages products never sees the rest of the surface.

What shipped

• 14 core modules covering page building, components, files, navigation, products, content and access control.
• Schema-driven editing forms — a new component type ships as a definition, not a builder change.
• Role-based access control down to the module level.
• Used daily by non-technical content teams across multiple corporate sites.

Outcome

Content changes that used to be engineering tickets now ship the same day, by the people who wanted them. The component catalogue keeps the corporate sites visually consistent without anyone policing it manually.