CIICESI: a Craft CMS research portal with custom ORCID API integration
A Webflow and Craft CMS platform for Politécnico do Porto's research centre, with a custom ORCID API integration that syncs 3000+ publications across 50 researchers.
The challenge
CIICESI is a research centre at ESTG, Politécnico do Porto. They had no website. Fifty researchers producing thousands of publications across multiple disciplines, and no digital platform to present any of it.
The brief was to build a site from scratch that could showcase the centre’s research output, researcher profiles, internal projects, and events. The core problem: publication data lived in ORCID, the global research identifier platform. Manually entering 3000+ publications wasn’t an option. The site needed to pull that data automatically and keep it structured around individual researchers.
The solution
We designed the site in Webflow and built the backend in Craft CMS — the same hybrid approach we use when a project’s content architecture outgrows Webflow’s native CMS.
The centrepiece is a custom Craft CMS module that connects to the ORCID API. Each researcher has an ORCID ID stored in their Craft entry. When the team triggers a sync, the module fetches that researcher’s publications, co-authored works, publication types, and contact details. ORCID’s PUT codes let us distinguish between primary publications and works where the researcher participated as a co-author, so the data stays accurate.
The researcher is the primary entry in the content model. Publications, projects, and profile data all connect back to the researcher record. Events and news are managed separately by the editorial team. This keeps the architecture clean and gives the team full control over every content type.
Sprig handles the publication filtering on the frontend — visitors can search and filter by researcher, publication type, and role without full page reloads.
Technical approach
Starting from nothing meant we had full control over the content architecture. We designed the data model around researchers as the central entity, with publications and projects as related entries. Events and news live as their own independent content types. The ORCID integration populates the publication side automatically. Internal projects are managed manually by the team.
The ORCID module was the most complex piece. The API provides structured data, but mapping it cleanly into Craft’s content model required handling edge cases: researchers with hundreds of publications, works with multiple contributors, and different publication types that needed distinct treatment in the frontend.
The whole project went from blank canvas to live site in three months, including the design phase in Webflow, the Craft CMS build, and the ORCID integration.
The results
CIICESI went from no online presence to a platform that manages 50 researcher profiles, 3000+ publications, 125+ events and news articles, and a growing list of internal projects. The publication data syncs from ORCID without manual entry. The team manages everything else independently.
For more on why we pair Webflow with Craft CMS, read Craft CMS and Webflow: why I use both for complex projects.
Key Results
3000+ publications from ORCID
A custom Craft CMS module connects to the ORCID API, fetching publications, co-authored works, and contact data for each researcher using their ORCID ID.
Researcher-centred architecture
Each researcher is the primary entry — their publications, projects, and profile data all flow from that single record.
Filterable publication library
Sprig powers the frontend filtering, letting visitors search publications by researcher, type, and participation role without full page reloads.
Full editorial control
The team manages events, news, internal projects, and researcher profiles independently — the ORCID sync handles the publication data.