Custom Craft CMS Plugin Development

Custom Plugin Development for Craft CMS

Your website should work the way you work. Not the other way round. Custom Craft CMS plugins help you add features, speed up tasks, such as automating a specific task or set of tasks, and connect systems without duct tape solutions or awkward hacks. Sometimes, a simple plugin is all that’s needed to solve a recurring problem or automate a single task.

We can build a plugin for Craft CMS to extend its functionality or address unique business challenges, ensuring your website meets your specific requirements.

If your team keeps saying things like “There must be a better way”, you’re in the right place.

Why custom plugins matter

Craft CMS gives you a clean, powerful base to build on. Custom plugins turn that base into a system that fits your business logic, your integrations and your goals.

You can:

• Automate tasks
• Connect APIs
• Extend Craft’s capabilities
• Build internal tools
• Give authors a better experience
• Add functionality that no off-the-shelf plugin can handle
• Create custom plugins or features tailored to your workflow or specific business requirements

If you can describe it, we can probably build it.

Ever caught yourself thinking “Why doesn’t Craft just…?” Good news. It can.

Why Craft is flexible for business logic and APIs

Craft doesn’t box you in. It gives you structure without limits. That means your plugin can:

• Apply your exact business rules
• Talk to any API you rely on
• Handle complex workflows cleanly
• Run processes in the background
• Add admin tools your team actually enjoys using

You can configure your plugin to match your business processes or integration requirements, ensuring every feature aligns with your specific workflows.

Craft’s architecture is predictable and modern. You don’t fight the system. You extend it.

Want to connect Craft to your CRM? Your fulfilment system? Your AI tools? Go for it.

This is where Craft shines for organisations with unique needs.

How Craft plugins compare to WordPress plugins

Our Honcho plugins (yes, we build the good stuff)

We’re not just talking theory. We build and maintain our own plugins on the Craft CMS Plugin Store, where each plugin is listed with a clear plugin name and a detailed description to help users quickly understand its purpose and benefits. Users can manage and configure these plugins from the plugins page in the admin interface, where plugin icons and details are displayed for easy identification and customisation.

Some highlights you’ll usually find in a Craft project:

• Announce
  Display announcements directly inside the Craft control panel. Perfect for nudging editors, highlighting updates or gently reminding your team to stop adding 14 variants of the same asset. It keeps communication visible where people are actually working.

• Sections Field
  Gives editors a clean, simple multi-select field for choosing from your site’s sections. No hacks. No dropdown pain. Just a straightforward way to improve content modelling and make author workflows smoother.

These plugins exist because the Craft community needed better tools. We built them because solving practical problems is our favourite hobby.

Popular Craft CMS plugins in the store

While custom plugins give you full control, there are some absolute Craft legends in the Plugin Store with huge download numbers. Each plugin in the Craft Plugin Store has its own dedicated page, where you can view details, screenshots, and see how the plugin displays its features and benefits. A few favourites:

• SEOmatic – Handles SEO with intelligence and automation.
• Blitz – Makes Craft sites unbelievably fast with smart caching.
• Formie – Advanced form building without the pain.
• Navigation – Manage navigation menus for your site

These plugins set the standard by making it easy to display advanced functionality on your site. When you need something beyond them, that’s where custom development steps in.

Our custom plugin development process

When we start a new plugin, we build it properly from the ground up. That begins with a clean directory and file structure so every component has a clear place to live. For example, we use sample code to demonstrate how to organise files and version tags, such as naming folders with version numbers like 1.0 for clarity and maintainability. No clutter. No cryptic filenames. No “random PHP file someone added five years ago and nobody knows why”.

Discovery

You share your goals. We ask smart questions. Together we shape the direction.

We dig into your workflows. Your challenges. Your ideal outcome. We also identify what data needs to be managed, retrieved, or integrated by the custom plugin to ensure it fully supports your business processes.

Technical analysis

We explore your Craft setup, dependencies, server and integration points. During this technical analysis phase, we also check for compatibility issues with existing systems or plugins to ensure smooth integration and functionality.

Scope of Work

Clear features. Clear timelines. Clear expectations.

When planning custom plugin development, it's essential to first establish the basic functionality required for the plugin to operate. This includes outlining the core features, such as setting up plugin files, registering custom features, and implementing simple actions. By defining the basic functionality upfront, you can ensure a clear scope before moving on to more advanced features and set realistic timelines for delivery.

Project plan

Milestones. Deliverables. Dates. No mysteries.

Technical design

We map the architecture, database structure, APIs, and file layout, including the creation of a new directory or new folder dedicated to the plugin. This setup involves establishing the main plugin file, which is typically a PHP file. The main PHP file contains the required plugin header and serves as the entry point for the plugin’s code and metadata, ensuring WordPress can recognise and activate the plugin correctly.

Development

We write clean, maintainable code using a robust code editor, which allows us to efficiently write, test, and debug our custom plugin development projects. Our process often involves implementing specific features with reusable code snippets, ensuring modularity and ease of updates.

While Craft CMS handles plugin activation differently than WordPress, we follow best practices such as using deactivation hooks in other CMSs to manage cleanup tasks like removing options or database entries. Once the basic functionality is in place, we can add advanced features—such as custom admin dashboards or flexible content fields—to further extend the plugin's capabilities. For projects requiring internationalization, we also consider the use of a text domain to ensure translations are consistent and maintainable, as is standard in platforms like WordPress. If your project involves content editing, we can draw on experience with block-based systems like the Gutenberg editor to deliver a modern, flexible editing experience.

Testing

Integration tests and user acceptance testing to make sure everything behaves. It's essential to verify that the plugin works correctly in all intended scenarios, ensuring compatibility and reliable performance before deployment.

Documentation and training

Your team gets everything they need to use and manage the plugin, including a detailed tutorial to guide users through setup and ongoing management.

Deployment

We roll out to staging, then live. Smooth and safe. For deployment, we package the custom plugin as a zip file, making it easy to install on your site—simply upload the zip file via your admin area or preferred deployment method.

Post-launch support

Bugs? Improvements? New ideas? We’re here.

If you need updates or enhancements, we can release a new version of your custom plugin to address bugs or add features. Just like best practices in WordPress plugin development, we ensure all updates are handled through plugins and never by modifying the CMS core, maintaining stability and compatibility.

Wrapping up

Custom Craft CMS plugins give you something off-the-shelf tools can’t: a website that works exactly the way you need it to. No compromises. No clunky workarounds. Just clean, purposeful functionality built around your workflows, your data and your goals.

Whether you want to automate a single repetitive task or power an entire business process, Craft gives us the freedom to build it properly. You get the speed, stability and flexibility of a modern CMS, backed by plugins designed for your team—not for the masses.

If your site feels like it’s constantly saying “sorry, I can’t do that”, it’s probably time to teach it some new tricks.

Tell us what you want your website to do.
We’ll build the plugin that makes it happen.