The Client
Edrington is a global premium spirits company whose portfolio includes some of the world's most respected Scotch whisky brands, including The Macallan, Highland Park, and The Famous Grouse.
The Situation
Edrington had reached an inflection point. Its legacy WordPress site, long overdue for migration, had stalled. But a conventional manual rebuild onto Acquia Cloud Site Factory and Managed Edge Optimization would have required massive developer overhead, long lead times covering scoping, discovery, and layered sign-off processes, and unacceptable compromises to the existing design system.
The Challenge
With the traditional path forward proving untenable, Edrington chose to pioneer an AI-native migration strategy that demonstrated an advanced AI tooling stack (Claude Code integrated with a Playwright MCP server) could generate, functionally test, and persist complex web components for a full site migration. Its goal was to rapidly establish a highly governed, modern component library within Acquia Source and Storybook, completely bypassing bloated "wagile" delivery ceremonies to achieve a fast, like-for-like transition with zero design compromises.
The primary business driver was drastically reducing the Total Cost of Ownership and delivery timeline. By embedding AI into the core of the audit, development, and QA pipeline, Edrington aimed to replace traditional manual coding with AI-driven development, eliminating developer overhead and unacceptable compromises that had historically made this migration unjustifiable.
A secondary, but highly critical, business objective was ensuring the seamless replication of strict alcohol-related compliance features across the new site. As a global spirits company, responsible marketing is fundamental to Edrington's operations. It needed to engineer an AI-generated Age Gate utilizing local storage for state persistence, while guaranteeing that this complex full-page overlay remained entirely unobtrusive to content editors configuring pages within Acquia Source's Drupal Canvas.
Both challenges had to be solved together, and Edrington was determined to solve them faster and more cost-effectively than a traditional build process could ever allow.
Technical hurdles:
- AI context for full site replication: Executing a like-for-like migration exclusively with AI required providing the AI with deep context across the entire site. The AI tooling needed a way to actively interact with the source site to understand hidden content, components, and form states.
- Editor experience vs. compliance overlays: Integrating full-page compliance overlays (like the Age Gate) into the new Acquia Source setup posed a significant risk to the authoring experience. Special technical handling was needed to ensure the full-page overlay did not block the Drupal Canvas editor experience.
- State persistence and Governance: Rapidly deploying functional site components required meeting strict state persistence requirements (using local storage) while establishing automated functional testing from the ground up.
Delivery hurdles:
- Avoiding the traditional "wagile" software delivery model, which would have burdened the full site migration with heavy developer overhead, endless ceremonies, extensive QA/UAT phases, and slow manual content population.
The Solution
To overcome the limitations of manual rebuilds, Acquia partner FreelyGive worked with Edrington to engineer an AI-accelerated development workflow built on Acquia Source to execute the full site migration.
AI-Driven Site Migration and Playwright Integration
Rather than migrating components manually, FreelyGive utilized Claude Code to generate the site's design components (such as the Brands example page) and critical compliance features (such as the Age Gate) in real time. To address context issues, a Playwright MCP server was integrated, enabling Claude Code to interact directly with the live source site, submit compliance forms, and view the protected content behind them, ensuring perfect functional replication.
Strict Governance via Storybook and Automated Testing
FreelyGive established a strict development workflow using Storybook to provide the governance Edrington required over its new component library. The team implemented automated functional testing for the newly generated components, which is viewable directly within Storybook and runs automatically from CLI and CI pipelines.
Seamless Acquia Source and Drupal Canvas Integration
Once the team generated and validated the components, they uploaded them 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 fully functional, persistent overlays (like the Age Gate) 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 and achieved the following:
- Uncompromised full site migration: The AI toolchain completely unblocked a stalled full-site migration project. It eliminated heavy "wagile" ceremonies and long QA phases, enabling a fast, like-for-like transition with minimal design enhancements — without the high costs of an ACSF/MEO rebuild.
- Sophisticated AI engineering: Successfully delivered complex site components and compliance features, including a fully functional Age Gate utilizing local storage for persistence, coded using Claude Code.
- Flawless editor experience: The special handling implemented for Acquia Source ensures the full-page compliance overlays remain completely unobtrusive to editors working within Drupal Canvas.
- Enhanced UX and accessibility: 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: Delivered a highly governed component library with automated functional testing seamlessly integrated into Storybook, CLI, and CI pipelines.