SiteMods standards are practical guardrails for web development: understand who owns a decision, use the platform deliberately, protect data and users, and leave enough clarity for future work.
Clear Ownership
Frameworks, extensions, project plugins, themes, content, and third-party services each keep defined responsibilities.
Platform-Native First
Use supported APIs, hooks, settings, metadata, editor mechanisms, and browser behavior when they satisfy the requirement.
Security in Layers
Capabilities, nonces, validation, sanitization, escaping, bounded input, backups, and recovery each address a different boundary.
Working Principles
- Begin with audience, content, workflow, and operational requirements.
- Prefer readable organization over clever indirection.
- Keep optional behavior inactive until a project selects it.
- Load assets and perform work only in the contexts that need them.
- Preserve unrelated settings, content, and ownership during every change.
- Treat accessibility and responsive behavior as implementation requirements.
- Keep authored source, generated assets, documentation, and release versions synchronized.
- Test ordinary behavior, disabled states, missing dependencies, failures, and recovery paths.
Production Is Part of Development
A feature is not complete merely because its primary path works. SiteMods reviews permissions, error behavior, data ownership, compatibility, deployment output, documentation, backups, and the effect of a component being unavailable. Reusable framework trees are synchronized and verified before a release is treated as ready.
The Practical Test
A future contributor should be able to locate a behavior, understand who owns it, see when it loads, and change it without tracing unrelated systems.