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Service — CMS

Content Management That Bends to Your Workflow.

Headless CMS platforms, custom admin panels, and content APIs — built around how your team publishes, not the other way around. The right system means editors ship content in minutes, not support tickets.

What We Build

Off-the-shelf for the 80 %. Custom for the 20.

Headless CMS

Sanity, Contentful, or Strapi — configured to match the way your team thinks about content. Structured, queryable, and decoupled from the front end.

Custom Admin Panels

React-based dashboards with a custom backend. When off-the-shelf admin UIs fall short, we build exactly the editing experience your editors need.

Content APIs

Headless content delivered to websites, mobile apps, and third-party integrations. One source of truth, many outputs.

Our Approach

WordPress is not the answer. Neither is guessing.

WordPress is rejected from the Sunrise CMS stack on performance and security grounds. Its admin interface was designed for blogs in 2005 — not for structured, multi-channel content in 2026. Plugin sprawl, update anxiety, and a monolithic architecture make it the wrong foundation for teams that publish frequently.

Headless CMS platforms like Sanity, Contentful, and Strapi handle the 80 % — structured content, media management, role-based access, and API delivery. For the remaining 20 % — unusual approval workflows, legacy system integrations, or highly custom editing experiences — Sunrise builds bespoke admin panels in React with a custom backend.

The goal is always the same: editors who can publish without filing a developer ticket. Content that reaches every channel from a single source of truth. And a system that the team actually enjoys using.

The best CMS is the one your editors forget they're using.

Process

From workflow audit to confident editors.

01

Workflow Audit

We map how content moves through the organisation today — who writes, who approves, who publishes, and where the bottlenecks live. No assumptions about what the CMS should look like until we understand the workflow it needs to serve.

02

Schema Design

Content types, fields, validation rules, and relationships — designed on paper before anything is configured. The schema is the foundation; getting it right means editors never fight the system.

03

Admin Build

The CMS is configured or custom-built, with the editing interface shaped around the schema. Preview, media handling, role-based access, and publishing workflows are wired in from the start.

04

Content Migration

Existing content is extracted, cleaned, restructured, and imported. Redirects are mapped. Nothing is lost, nothing is orphaned, and URLs are preserved where they carry SEO value.

05

Editor Training

A focused 60-minute walkthrough with the editorial team — not a slide deck, but hands-on publishing in the live system. Editors leave confident, not confused.

Deliverables

Everything you need. Nothing you don't.

CMS configured and deployed — Sanity, Contentful, Strapi, or custom
Content schemas designed for the editorial workflow
Editor accounts with role-based access control (RBAC)
Content migrated from the previous system
Live preview wired to the front end
Image pipeline — optimisation, resizing, CDN delivery
Editor documentation — how to publish, where things live
SEO controls — meta fields, Open Graph, canonical URLs per page
Multilingual support where required
Backup and revision history configured

Why It Matters

Five minutes or five days.

The WordPress admin is a maze. Dozens of menu items, plugin settings buried three levels deep, and a visual editor that renders differently from the live site. Teams learn to work around the CMS instead of with it — and every workaround costs time.

Off-the-shelf platforms solve the common case, but they constrain unusual workflows. When the content model does not match the platform's assumptions, editors end up copy-pasting between fields, duplicating entries, or abandoning the CMS altogether in favour of spreadsheets and email chains.

The right CMS turns a content update into a five-minute task. The wrong CMS turns it into a developer ticket with a two-day turnaround. Over a year, that gap compounds into thousands of pounds in lost productivity — and content that never gets published at all.

Frequently Asked

Common questions, honest answers.

Sanity vs Contentful vs Strapi — which should we use?+
It depends on team size, budget, and how custom the editing experience needs to be. Sanity offers the most flexibility for custom schemas and real-time collaboration. Contentful suits teams that want a polished, managed platform. Strapi is open-source and self-hosted, giving full control over data. Sunrise recommends based on the workflow audit, not on preference.
Can you migrate us off WordPress?+
Yes. WordPress migrations are a core part of the CMS practice. Content is extracted, restructured into clean schemas, and imported into the new system. URLs are preserved, redirects are mapped, and SEO value is carried over. The result is a faster, more secure content platform with a better editing experience.
How much editor training is included?+
Every CMS project includes a 60-minute hands-on training session with the editorial team, plus written documentation. Additional training sessions can be arranged for larger teams or more complex workflows.
Can the CMS handle user-generated content?+
Yes. Content APIs can accept submissions from forms, portals, or apps — with moderation workflows, spam filtering, and approval queues built in. The architecture depends on volume and risk tolerance, which is scoped during discovery.
Where does the content actually live?+
With a managed CMS like Sanity or Contentful, content lives on the provider’s infrastructure with SLA-backed uptime and CDN delivery. With Strapi or a custom build, content lives on infrastructure Sunrise provisions — typically a UK-based VPS with automated backups.
Do you support multilingual content?+
Yes. All three major headless CMS platforms support localisation. Sunrise configures language variants, translation workflows, and locale-aware content delivery as part of the schema design phase.

Tell us what you're building.

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