CIICESI: a Craft CMS research portal with custom ORCID API integration

CIICESI did not need a brochure site. They needed a research portal, built from nothing, in three months.

The research centre had no website, but needed a public platform capable of presenting its researchers, publications, projects, events and news in a way that felt credible and could keep growing after launch. The difficult part was not creating pages. It was making the academic data manageable without asking the team to manually enter thousands of publications.

From no website to a research system

CIICESI is a research centre at ESTG, Politécnico do Porto. The new platform had to give the centre a proper digital presence while organising the work of around 50 researchers across multiple disciplines.

That meant the content model had to start from the researchers, not from generic pages. Each researcher needed a profile. Each profile needed publications, project relationships and supporting information. Events and news needed to be managed by the team. Publications needed to come from ORCID, because manually entering more than 3000 academic works would have made the site impossible to maintain from day one.

The deadline made the decision sharper: the whole platform had to be designed, built and launched in three months.

Designing visually, building structurally

As with other complex Craft CMS projects, Fred used Webflow first as the visual build environment. It gave the project a fast way to shape the interface, responsive layouts and front-end behaviour before moving into the production CMS.

The final site, however, is Craft CMS. The exported HTML, CSS and JavaScript were rebuilt as Twig templates and connected to a structured content model designed around researchers, publications, projects, events and news.

That separation mattered. Webflow helped move quickly on the visual side, but Craft CMS gave the project the structure it needed: custom fields, relational entries, editorial control and a place where external research data could be mapped properly.

Making ORCID work inside Craft CMS

The centrepiece of GOMO’s build was a custom Craft CMS module connected to the ORCID API.

Each researcher has an ORCID ID stored in their Craft entry. When the team triggers the sync manually, the module fetches publication metadata and researcher information from ORCID, then maps it into the Craft content model.

The hard part was not just calling an API. ORCID data is complex. Publications can have multiple contributors, different types, inconsistent metadata, and identifiers that need to be handled carefully. Co-authored works were especially important: the platform had to distinguish between a researcher’s own publication record and works where they appear as a participant or co-author.

That required a content model and sync process that could respect the academic structure instead of flattening everything into a simple list.

Researchers as the centre of the platform

The site is built around researcher profiles as the primary records. Publications, projects and profile data connect back to each researcher, while events and news are managed separately by the CIICESI team.

Sprig powers the publication filtering on the frontend, allowing visitors to search and filter by researcher, publication type and role without full page reloads. That makes the publication library usable even at scale.

The team manages the editorial content directly in Craft. ORCID handles the publication data. The two sides stay connected, but each one does the job it is best suited for.

A maintainable research portal in three months

CIICESI went from no website to a live research platform in three months.

The site now manages 50 researcher profiles, 3000+ synced publications, 125+ events and articles, and a growing set of internal projects. Publications are brought in from ORCID without manual data entry, while the team keeps control of profiles, events, news and project content.

This is the kind of Craft CMS development where the CMS and the integration have to be designed together. The ORCID sync only works because the content model underneath it is clear, relational and built around the way the research centre actually operates.