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Four legacy platforms, unified in twelve weeks

The AHPA Atlas landing page, with unified search across herbs, monographs, NDI reports and botanical identities

The American Herbal Products Association (AHPA) is the primary trade association for the US herbal and dietary supplement industry. Its publications set the plant names, safety classifications and identity standards the industry works to. That authority sat on three ageing websites and a printed book — four access methods, no way to search across them. AHPA brought in Pixie Labs to replace all four with one platform.

  • They needed one platform, not four

    Three of the four resources ran on ageing platforms AHPA could no longer patch or extend, and one of them with no source code at all. The fourth, Herbs of Commerce, existed only in print. Pixie Labs designed and built the AHPA Atlas in twelve weeks: one Ruby on Rails 8 platform with single sign-on and cross-content search.

Cross-content Atlas search results for ginseng, spanning monographs, NDI reports and botanical identities

We helped AHPA achieve…

  • 01.

    Out of print, into one search

    Herbs of Commerce, a reference named in FDA regulation, had never been searchable. Thousands of plant species now resolve to one page carrying safety class, drug interactions, taxonomy and New Dietary Ingredient status.
  • 02.

    One login, four resources

    Naylor single sign-on replaced three separate legacy logins, and one session now carries members across the whole Atlas.
  • 03.

    Three legacy platforms retired

    Three separate stacks, each with its own hosting, security surface and maintenance burden, are now one.
An Atlas herb detail page cross-referencing safety, taxonomy and botanical authentication data

Using our Vital Systems™ process to drive progress

  • Diagnosing issues

    We audited all four resources, their content models and their hosting. Alongside the Atlas, we reviewed AHPA's IT setup across Office 365, SharePoint, AWS, domain management, device management and password handling, then handed them a report of what to fix first.

  • Planning priorities

    We sequenced a twelve-week roadmap around the highest-value work first: Herbs of Commerce as a digital product, then single sign-on, then migration and cross-referencing. Anything that wasn't core to launch went to a later phase.

  • Rebuilding systems

    We migrated thousands of plant records and dietary ingredient reports onto a single Rails 8 platform. Every herb now has one detail page linking its safety class, drug interactions, taxonomy, New Dietary Ingredient status and authentication data.

  • Priming for growth

    The Atlas is built upon stable foundations: one Rails app, one database, search inside PostgreSQL. New content types need no new moving parts. The platforms it replaced were abandoned because nobody could safely change them. This one is built to be changed.

Browsing the Herbs of Commerce digital edition inside the Atlas

Results

AHPA's published work is now a single integrated platform. Finding an answer no longer means knowing which resource holds it. Whatever AHPA publishes next has a home.

  • 01

    Ruby on Rails 8 for the application backend and admin content management.

  • 02

    PostgreSQL full-text search across all four content types at once.

  • 03

    Hotwire, using Turbo and Stimulus, for a fast interface without a separate frontend app.

  • 04

    Tailwind CSS for a consistent design across desktop and mobile.

  • 05

    Naylor single sign-on gating the Atlas on active AHPA membership.

  • 06

    Render with GitHub Actions CI/CD for repeatable, low-maintenance deployment.