The Challenge

The St. Paul Center operates multiple brands under one roof — the main St. Paul Center, Emmaus Academic, and Emmaus Road Publishing — each with its own audience, product catalog, and visual identity. Their existing WordPress site couldn't keep up with the complexity. Products, events, podcasts, Bible studies, and editorial content were spread across disconnected systems, and the team had no clean way to manage it all or present it coherently to visitors.

The Center needed a platform that could handle multi-brand publishing, a large product catalog backed by Shopify, media libraries, event registration, and academic content — all from one backend.

The Approach

Highland built the new stpaulcenter.com on Craft CMS with a deep Shopify integration for ecommerce. Rather than trying to replace Shopify's catalog management, Highland connected the two systems — Shopify handles inventory, pricing, and checkout while Craft CMS owns the front-end presentation, search, and editorial experience. This gave the marketing and content teams full control over how products appear on the site without touching the store backend.

Each brand — St. Paul Center, Emmaus Academic, and Emmaus Road Publishing — has its own navigation, header treatment, and design context, but all content lives in the same Craft installation. The team can cross-reference products, authors, endorsements, and Bible studies across brands without duplicating content.

Key Features

• Multi-Brand Architecture. Three distinct branded experiences — each with its own menus, headers, and visual identity — powered by a single Craft CMS backend. Shared content types like authors and endorsements link across all three brands.
• Shopify-Integrated Product Catalog. Products sync from Shopify with full variant support, pricing, and checkout. Craft CMS handles the product display, filtering, and search — including refinements by publisher, category, and tags — while Shopify handles the transaction.
• Typesense Search. Fast search across products, pages, events, podcasts, and Bible studies. Product search indexes the default variant price and supports filtering by multiple facets.
• Media Center. Podcasts pull automatically from Podbean, and video content is organized with its own search and browsing interface.
• Author and Endorsement System. Authors and endorsers are their own content types in Craft, linked back to products. Author bios can link to fuller profile pages, and endorsements display contextually on product detail pages.
• Event Registration. Events are managed as a Shopify product type, with Craft providing the front-end presentation — schedules, presenter bios, and registration links — while Shopify handles ticketing.

The Outcome

The new stpaulcenter.com consolidated three brand experiences and a large product catalog into a single, manageable platform. The marketing team builds pages, features products, and publishes content across all three brands without developer support. Highland continues to develop the platform, with additional subsites and features in the pipeline.

Live Site: stpaulcenter.com