CASE STUDY · ENERGY & UTILITIES RESEARCH
Member research portal with AI-assisted search
As part of the client’s development team, we helped build and evolve the digital platform of a research and advisory firm serving the energy sector: a Drupal-based member portal where subscribers access research, data and events, with AI-assisted search layered on top.
29custom Drupal modules
3+ yearsof continuous development, 2022 to 2025
3search layers: Solr, Algolia and AI-assisted
2-waySalesforce synchronisation
THE CHALLENGE
What needed to happen
The firm’s value lies in its research, but members could only benefit if they could reach the right material quickly, and only the material their organisation subscribes to. The client was moving from a legacy platform and needed a modern, maintainable site that enforced fine-grained access, connected to the CRM and events systems the business already ran on, gave editors flexible publishing tools, and made a large research library genuinely searchable.
WHAT WE DELIVERED
A deep research library,
easy to find and act on.
Member research portal
- Gated research library with entitlement-based access
- Personalised dashboards and a news dashboard for members
- Alerts, newsletters and saved content
- Embedded PDFs and interactive analytics dashboards
- Send-to-a-colleague sharing by email
Search & AI research assistant
- Faceted search with autocomplete
- Instant search interface built in React
- An AI-assisted research search app powered by a large language model
- Filters by topic and year, with saved searches
- Results surfaced as research reports members can open directly
Identity & access
- Login by email or username with one-time passcodes
- Single sign-on across the firm’s satellite sites
- Access-control rules deciding who sees which content
- Role-based redirects after login
- Friendly access-denied pages with paths to subscribe
Business integrations
- Two-way Salesforce synchronisation with field mappings
- Event platform integration
- Content feed imports with transformation rules
- Satisfaction surveys built on webforms
- Privacy-friendly analytics and tag management
Editorial experience
- Layout Builder and block-based editing with custom blocks
- Moderation workflows and review-based auto-unpublishing
- Link checking, redirects and content cloning
- SEO metadata, structured data and XML sitemaps
Migration & platform
- Content migration from the legacy platform
- Drupal core and module upgrades over time
- A reusable React component library for the front end
ENGINEERING & OPERATIONS
- Containerised local development with Docker
- Hosting on AWS Elastic Beanstalk with a managed relational database
- Bitbucket Pipelines for continuous integration and deployment
- End-to-end browser tests with Playwright
- React components documented in Storybook with visual testing
- Configuration management to promote changes safely between environments
- Scripts for database syncing, file syncing and seeding test data
WHAT IT MADE POSSIBLE
- Members able to find relevant research faster, including through AI-assisted search
- Content access enforced automatically according to each subscription
- One sign-in across the firm’s family of sites
- CRM and event data kept in step with the website
- Editors publishing and maintaining content without developer help
TECHNOLOGY
Tools we used
DrupalPHPTwigReactTypeScriptMaterial UITailwind CSSAlgoliaApache SolrOpenAISalesforceTableauAWS Elastic BeanstalkAmazon RDSDockerBitbucket PipelinesPlaywrightStorybookChromaticMatomo
Client name and confidential details withheld.MORE WORK
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