Drupal App Development Company

What does custom Drupal development cover?

Custom Drupal work starts where site building stops. Site building is configuration - content types and fields, taxonomies, Views for listings, menus and roles - exported to YAML so it moves between environments through Git. Custom development is the code around it:

• Custom modules: services, event subscribers, hooks, plugins and forms for rules no contributed module covers.
• Editorial workflows: Content Moderation states such as draft, in review and published, with a permission for each transition.
• Multilingual sites: interface, content and configuration translation, all in Drupal core.
• Headless or decoupled Drupal: content served through JSON:API in core, or GraphQL from a contributed module, to a React, Next.js or mobile front end.
• A component-based Twig theme, and integrations with SSO, CRM, search and payment systems.

Drupal 7 has reached end of life - what should you do?

Drupal 7 stopped receiving community support in January 2025: no more security releases from the Drupal Security Team, and many of its contributed modules were abandoned well before that. A Drupal 7 site still runs, but each newly found vulnerability stays open unless someone patches it privately. Paid extended support can buy time; it does not give the site a future.

Moving to current Drupal is a rebuild of the code with a migration of the content, not an in-place upgrade. Drupal's Migrate API carries content, users, taxonomy terms, files and URL aliases across; the theme is rebuilt in Twig; each Drupal 7 module is replaced by its modern version, by a core feature or by custom code. We audit the old site first, run the migration repeatedly against a copy until the counts match, and map redirects so search rankings follow the old URLs.

Drupal, WordPress, Strapi or Contentful - which should you choose?

Choose Drupal when the content itself is complex: many editors with different permissions, approval steps, several languages or sites, and content reused across web and apps. Drupal handles all of that in core, and because it is self-hosted you own the code and the data outright.

Pick something lighter when the job is lighter. A marketing site run by one or two people is cheaper to build and run on WordPress. A team of JavaScript developers who want a headless CMS they extend in code will move faster with Strapi. If you would rather not run servers at all, Contentful is a managed content platform billed by plan. We give the recommendation in writing before any payment.

Can Drupal work with BigCommerce, Shopify or another commerce platform?

Yes, in two ways. Drupal Commerce keeps the store inside Drupal, which suits catalogues that are mostly content - publications, memberships, event tickets. When a hosted commerce platform already runs the catalogue, cart and checkout, Drupal stays the content and experience layer and talks to the store through its APIs and webhooks.

When a Drupal and commerce integration misbehaves, the cause is usually one of these:

• A product changed in the store while Drupal still serves a cached page, because the webhook handler does not invalidate the right cache tags.
• Webhooks that never arrive - the endpoint sits behind a login or firewall rule - or that fail without writing a log entry.
• Both systems treating themselves as the owner of product data, so edits are overwritten in one direction.
• API rate limits hit by a full resync that should have been queued and batched.
• Checkout redirects and cookies that break when the store and the Drupal site live on different domains.

What does a Drupal site cost to run after launch?

Hosting, updates and people. Hosting ranges from a server you manage - Nginx, PHP-FPM, MySQL or MariaDB, Redis, often Varnish and Solr - to a managed Drupal platform such as Acquia or Pantheon, which adds ready-made environments and workflows for a higher monthly fee.

Updates are not optional. The Drupal Security Team publishes advisories for core and for contributed modules covered by its policy, usually on Wednesdays, and each should be applied through Composer, tested and deployed within days. Minor core releases arrive through the year and a new major version roughly every two years. That is why we keep the contributed module list short and security-covered, and why a Miracuves retainer, from $2,299/month, pairs maintenance with feature work.

How much does custom Drupal development cost, and how long does it take?

At Miracuves, custom Drupal work starts from $3,699, depending on the work - a module, an integration or a clean-up of an inherited site. A full custom Drupal build typically costs $10,000-$35,000 and takes 2-8 weeks; larger scopes, such as a Drupal 7 migration spanning several sites, are quoted in writing before work starts.

What moves the figure: how many content types and editorial roles, the approval workflow, languages and sites, how much content must be migrated and cleaned, integrations such as SSO, CRM, search or commerce, and whether a separate headless front end is part of it. If one of our catalogue platforms matches your idea, it has a fixed price and ships in 6 working days, but it runs on its own stack, not Drupal.

Freelancer, in-house team or a Drupal development company?

A freelancer suits a contained task on a healthy site. An in-house Drupal team makes sense once the site changes every week and is core to the business. A company fits work that needs several skills at once - a site builder, a PHP module developer, a themer, QA and someone who owns the deployment.

Whoever you hire, ask the same questions. Is configuration exported and versioned, or clicked into production? Which contributed modules will they rely on, and are those covered by security advisories? Who applies security releases, and how fast? Who owns the hosting account and the repository? At Miracuves the answers go into the written scope, the NDA is signed before details are shared, and the IP is assigned to you at project start.