CoreLabs is our internal research and development space where experimentation, curiosity, and practical innovation all have room to grow.
Some ideas become products, some become tools, and some are simply built for fun. Every experiment helps us learn, improve, and sharpen our delivery across websites, apps, multiplayer systems, and digital platforms.
CoreLabs supports both purposeful R&D and light-hearted projects that keep creativity alive. Those opportunities to experiment, learn new skills, and push boundaries are part of what makes our team strong.
CoreLabs is where our team explores ideas beyond day-to-day delivery. It gives us a place to test concepts, challenge assumptions, and build solutions that may later become real client value.
We encourage staff to contribute ideas, shape prototypes, and experiment with different technical approaches. Some projects are highly practical and feed directly into platforms like SMART Data, while others are deliberately playful and help keep creativity flowing across the team.
Many of the ideas explored within CoreLabs influence how we approach client work. From development workflows and automation tools to multiplayer systems, cloud infrastructure, and new product concepts, CoreLabs helps us continuously refine the way we design, build, and support digital products.
Not every CoreLabs project is intended to become a commercial product. Some solve real-world problems, some help us explore new technologies, and some are simply built for the challenge, curiosity, or enjoyment of creating something new.
For us, R&D is not about hype. It is about creating space to think clearly, build thoughtfully, and keep improving what we offer as a team.
CoreLabs - "Research and Development"
A live look at what CoreLabs is actively building right now. Each featured project explores a different challenge, opportunity, or technical idea. Some may evolve into products or services, while others simply exist because we think they’re interesting, useful, or worth exploring.
The successor to the original SMART platform and one of our most important ongoing CoreLabs products, actively developed and used as a core part of our project ecosystem.
Project Lead: Dan Walker
Length: · 3 Years +
Team Rating: (5/5) CoreTechnics team
A headless publishing flow pairing WordPress content editing to deliver a modern front-end stack. We have even taken steps to bring this into the SMART Data family... watch this space!
Project Lead: James Durham
Length: · 2 Years +
Team Rating: (4.5/5) CoreTechnics team
A fun team concept used to test timing techniques, audio mixing and splicing, and lightweight HTML5 audio behaviours in playful UI experiments.
Project Lead: CoreTechnics Team
Length: · 5 Years +
Team Rating: (4/5) CoreTechnics team
An experiment focused on creating social-ready video content (which we plan to use) with HTML5 animation, synced audio, and in-browser recording/export workflows.
Project Lead: Zara Collins
Length: · 2 Years +
Team Rating: (4/5) CoreTechnics team
We keep CoreLabs open, collaborative, and practical. Ideas can come from anyone on the team, and the best ones are nurtured into prototypes, tools, and working systems.
Team members are encouraged to bring ideas forward, from tiny quality-of-life tools to larger platform concepts.
We build small proofs quickly, learn from real use, and only scale ideas that show clear practical value.
Even playful projects strengthen skills, collaboration, and confidence across engineering, product, and delivery.
CoreLabs gives us a structured way to explore new ideas without losing the playful energy that makes experimentation valuable. The lessons we learn here feed back into how we build, support, and improve real client projects.
We test concepts, workflows, and product ideas before deciding whether they should become bigger internal or client-facing projects.
Experimenting with new technologies helps our team stay curious, confident, and ready to solve unfamiliar problems.
The best lessons from CoreLabs feed back into our websites, applications, platforms, multiplayer systems, and support processes.
An archive of practical builds and creative side projects that helped shape how we work today.
As website performance became increasingly important for SEO, image optimisation became a key focus. ToffeePress was created to make image compression simple for WordPress users.
Project Lead: James Durham
Length: · 4 Years
Team Rating: (3.5/5) CoreTechnics team
The original SMART born in mid-2019, a concept to manage websites in a distributed and more secure manner than many other CRMs at the time. Built upon TwistPHP and SlenderJS it developed a strong long-term foundation that is now the precursor to SMART Data.
Project Lead: Dan Walker
Length: · 7 Years
Team Rating: (4.5/5) CoreTechnics team
A PHP framework developed over many years. Dan (our Director) started this project during his early years of development, learning skills and techniques eventually releasing as an open-source framework. TwistPHP has now found its home in the CoreLabs archive.
Project Lead: Dan Walker
Length: · 7 Years
Team Rating: (5/5) CoreTechnics team
A Pre-SMART solution for the management of CentOS cloud based servers. Inspired by Plesk/cPanel workflows and built with Bash and PHP, Odin powered our servers for many years.
Project Lead: Dan Walker
Length: · 9 Years
Team Rating: (4.5/5) CoreTechnics team
An internal office game to both challenge creativity and build office moral during Covid-19. Featuring voice controls, soundtrack loops, and skill-based scoring.
Project Lead: CoreTechnics Team
Length: · 1 Year
Team Rating: (3.5/5) CoreTechnics team
Character stats project using the League of Legends API for data exploration and profile viewing. An interesting concept working with live data from a third-party game developer.
Project Lead: James Durham
Length: · 4 Months
Team Rating: (3/5) CoreTechnics team
A JavaScript framework inspired by Vue and jQuery, built so the team could learn and better understand front-end framework internals and navigation flow.
Project Lead: Dan Walker
Length: · 3 Years
Team Rating: (3.5/5) CoreTechnics team
Led by Dan Walker
SMART Data is the successor to the original SMART platform and remains one of our most significant ongoing CoreLabs projects. Developed as a self-funded product, it has grown through real-world delivery experience and practical client requirements rather than being built around theoretical use cases. Today it supports connected data management, operational workflows, API integrations, automation, reporting, and platform tooling across a wide range of internal and client-facing solutions. As new challenges emerge, SMART Data continues to evolve, allowing us to refine features through direct usage and ensuring it remains a flexible foundation for future digital products.
SMART Data has become a central part of how we deliver practical, connected digital platforms. Every project teaches us something new, and those lessons continue to shape the platform into something more capable with every release.
Led by James Durham
This project explores how organisations can retain the familiarity of WordPress content management while benefiting from the flexibility, security, and performance of a modern headless architecture. By integrating WordPress directly with SMART Data, editorial teams can continue using familiar publishing workflows while content is delivered through structured APIs into modern front-end applications. Current development focuses on content modelling, publishing workflows, API design, caching strategies, and front-end rendering performance. The long-term goal is to create a seamless publishing ecosystem that bridges traditional content management with modern development practices.
We wanted to keep everything people already like about WordPress while removing many of the limitations that come with traditional themes. It’s exciting to see familiar workflows powering something much more flexible behind the scenes.
Led by CoreTechnics Team
Fart Button began as a deliberately light-hearted internal experiment but quickly became a useful sandbox for testing audio playback techniques, timing precision, sound mixing, and browser-based interaction patterns. While simple on the surface, the project gave us an opportunity to explore HTML5 audio behaviour, performance optimisation, and user feedback mechanisms in a low-pressure environment. Built entirely around genuine recorded sounds, it remains one of our favourite examples of how playful experimentation can still provide valuable technical learning.
Not every project has to solve a business problem. Sometimes the most ridiculous ideas end up teaching you something useful, and this one definitely gave us a few laughs along the way.
Led by Zara Collins
Social Videos is an ongoing experiment focused on creating browser-based tools for producing engaging social media content without relying on heavyweight desktop software. The project explores HTML5 animation, layered audio synchronisation, screen recording, and automated export workflows that generate social-ready MP4 content directly within the browser. Beyond the technical challenges, it provides valuable experience in creative tooling, content production workflows, and performance optimisation. Importantly, the project is intentionally non-AI driven, allowing us to focus on understanding and refining the underlying creative processes ourselves.
This project is helping us sharpen practical creative workflows in the browser, from motion design right through to social-ready video export. There’s something really satisfying about building the tools yourself and understanding every step of the process.
Led by James Durham
ToffeePress was created during a period when website performance and image optimisation were becoming increasingly important for search visibility and user experience. The project combined a WordPress plugin with a supporting public website, making advanced image compression and optimisation accessible to everyday website owners. Beyond the technology itself, the project gave us valuable experience in product development, onboarding, user support, and distributing software through the WordPress ecosystem.
ToffeePress taught us a lot about building practical tools for real users. The challenge wasn’t just compression technology—it was making something technical feel simple and approachable.
Led by Dan Walker
SMART v1 was the original platform that laid the groundwork for what would eventually become SMART Data. Built using TwistPHP and SlenderJS, it was designed to provide a more secure and distributed approach to website and platform management than many solutions available at the time. Over several years it supported numerous client projects while helping us refine our thinking around architecture, scalability, and operational tooling. Although it is now being phased out in favour of SMART Data, its influence remains visible throughout many of the systems and processes we use today.
SMART served us incredibly well for many years. Looking back, it’s easy to see how many ideas from that original platform still influence the way we build software today.
Led by Dan Walker
TwistPHP began as a personal learning project and gradually evolved into a fully featured open-source PHP framework. Over the years it became a platform for exploring software architecture, reusability, security practices, and maintainable development patterns. While it now sits within the CoreLabs archive, the lessons learned through its development continue to influence our approach to bespoke software engineering. Many of the principles first explored within TwistPHP can still be seen in the way we design and structure modern applications today.
Building TwistPHP taught me lessons that no tutorial ever could. It forced me to think about architecture, maintainability, and long-term design in a way that still influences how I write software today.
Led by Dan Walker
Before SMART and SMART Data, Odin Server Manager was developed as a practical way to better understand and manage cloud infrastructure. Inspired by platforms such as cPanel and Plesk, it provided a custom management layer built with Bash and PHP that supported server provisioning, package management, configuration, scheduled tasks, and day-to-day operational workflows. More than anything, Odin served as a valuable learning platform, helping us build a deeper understanding of Linux systems administration and infrastructure management from the ground up.
Odin wasn’t built because we needed another control panel. It was built because we wanted to understand what was happening underneath the hood and gain real hands-on experience managing servers ourselves.
Led by CoreTechnics Team
BountyShot started as a creative office challenge during the Covid-19 period and evolved into a surprisingly feature-rich game complete with voice controls, soundtrack loops, scoring mechanics, and themed interactions. While its purpose was largely entertainment, it also gave the team an opportunity to experiment with interaction design, user engagement techniques, and rapid prototyping. The project remains a great reminder that creativity and collaboration often thrive when people are encouraged to build something purely for fun.
BountyShot was one of those projects that started as a bit of fun and ended up teaching us more than we expected. It reminded us that creativity usually works best when you’re enjoying yourself.
Led by James Durham
Champion Index was a game-focused project built around the League of Legends API, allowing players to explore champion data, track statistics, and share gameplay achievements. Although never released the platform aimed to provide player profiles, match tracking, champion builds, trophy systems, and social sharing features all powered by live game data. Beyond its gaming focus, the project gave us valuable experience working with third-party APIs, large datasets, performance optimisation, and presenting complex information in an accessible and engaging way.
Working with live game data was both challenging and rewarding. It was a great opportunity to explore how raw statistics can be transformed into something genuinely useful and engaging for users.
Led by Dan Walker
SlenderJS was created as a learning exercise to better understand how modern JavaScript frameworks operate behind the scenes. Inspired by technologies such as Vue and jQuery, it provided reactive front-end functionality, routing behaviour, and navigation management that would later be used within the original SMART platform. Building the framework from scratch offered invaluable insight into state management, rendering cycles, event handling, and overall framework architecture. While no longer actively developed, it remains an important part of our technical journey.
There’s no better way to understand how a framework works than trying to build one yourself. SlenderJS gave us a much deeper appreciation for the challenges and clever ideas behind modern front-end development.
CoreLabs is important to us because it protects something that can get lost in busy delivery cycles: creative thinking. We want the team to have space to test ideas, challenge norms, and build things simply because they are interesting or useful.
Some CoreLabs work becomes part of the services we deliver. Some of it stays as internal learning. Both outcomes matter. They help us stay sharp, humble, and grounded in practical engineering.
We also believe there is value in building things simply because they are interesting, useful, ridiculous, or fun. That freedom is often where the best learning happens.
At its heart, CoreLabs is about people enjoying what they build and growing together as a team.
Dan - "Creativity with Purpose"
Whether you're planning a new digital project, need reliable technical support, or want experienced guidance before committing to a build, we'd love to hear from you. The best outcomes usually start with a clear brief and an honest conversation about goals, scope, and budget.
From websites and applications to multiplayer systems, hosting, and long-term support, we provide professional delivery built around practical requirements and long-term value.
