Acquia delivers uncompromised AI-native migration and lower TCO for Edrington.

The Client

Edrington is a global premium spirits company whose portfolio includes some of the world's most respected Scotch whisky brands – The Macallan, Highland Park, and The Famous Grouse.

The Challenge

Edrington’s WordPress site was long overdue for migration, but a manual rebuild would have required significant development time and unacceptable compromises to the existing design system. 

With the project stalling, Edrington chose to pioneer an AI-native migration strategy, aiming to lower Total Cost of Ownership for web content and reduce delivery timelines.

One challenge was replicating strict alcohol-related compliance features across the new site. As a global spirits company, responsible marketing and consolidated governance are key. Edrington needed to create complex features such as a full-page overlay for age verification that was locally stored and unobtrusive.

The Solution

A fast, like-for-like transition with zero compromise is a serious challenge – and serious challenges require serious solutions. 

Acquia’s partner FreelyGive worked with Edrington to engineer an AI-accelerated workflow built on Acquia Source to handle the site migration, while ensuring Marketing and IT were working in lockstep.

Together they developed an AI tooling stack (Claude Code integrated with a Playwright MCP server) to build complex web components while bypassing bloated "wagile" ceremonies. The result? A platform with open architecture and strict governance that bypassed heavy developer overhead, endless ceremonies, extensive QA/UAT phases, and slow manual content population.

Technical hurdles:

• AI context: Like-for-like migration meant providing the AI with deep context across the source site, to understand hidden content, components, and form states
   
• Editor experience vs. compliance overlays: Full-page compliance overlays posed risks to the existing authoring experience. Special technical handling was needed to ensure the overlay didn’t block the Drupal Canvas editor.
   
• State persistence and governance: Rapidly deploying functional site components meant adhering to strict state persistence requirements, while establishing automated functional testing.

AI-Driven Site Migration and Playwright Integration

Rather than migrating components manually, FreelyGive used Claude Code to generate the site's design components and compliance features in real time.

A Playwright MCP server enabled Claude Code to interact directly with the live source site, submit compliance forms and view protected content, ensuring perfect functional replication and an easy-to-find site.

Always connected to Governance via Storybook and Automated Testing

FreelyGive used Storybook to provide governance over Edrington’s new component library. With one platform for content growth and governance, the team implemented automated functional testing for the newly generated components, viewable directly within Storybook and running automatically from CLI and CI pipelines.

Seamless Acquia Source and Drupal Canvas Integration

Once validated, the team uploaded the components to the Acquia Source site. Content editors can now seamlessly add these components to pages and configure them natively using Drupal Canvas. 

Crucially, FreelyGive implemented specific technical handling for the Drupal Canvas editor, ensuring that persistent overlays operate flawlessly on the front end without blocking the back-end editor experience.

The Results

By relying on an advanced AI and Acquia tech stack, the project transformed the delivery lifecycle:

• Uncompromised full site migration: The Acquia AI toolchain put the entire digital estate in one place, completely unblocking a stalled migration without the high costs of an ACSF/MEO rebuild
   
• Sophisticated AI engineering: Acquia Source successfully delivered complex site components and compliance features, including a fully functional and locally-stored persistent age gate, using Claude Code.
   
• Flawless editor experience: The special handling implemented for Acquia Source ensures the full-page compliance overlays remain completely unobtrusive to content editors working within Drupal Canvas,  keeping the focus where it belongs: on creating and delivering content.
• Enhanced UX and accessibility: Acquia builds sites to be found. The AI-assisted development workflow resulted in measurable UX and accessibility improvements, specifically in keyboard interactions, surpassing even the recent designs used by other Edrington brands.
   
• Robust quality assurance: Strict governance all in one place, thanks to a highly governed component library with automated functional testing seamlessly integrated into Storybook, CLI, and CI pipelines. That’s compliance built in, not bolted on.