American Battlefield Trust - Algolia Search Engine Implementation

Overview

The American Battlefield Trust website (battlefields.org) is a large Drupal site with thousands of pages of historical content. Algolia search was my first project at Interactive Knowledge, and I implemented the integration from scratch, replacing the default Drupal search with a fast, faceted, client-side experience.

Search Implementation

I built the Algolia search integration end to end:

• Algolia InstantSearch block, facets, and initial styling (ABT-835)
• Search page build with pagination, sorting, navigation blocks, and results display (ABT-843, ABT-844)
• Migrated search from /algsearch to /search
• Facet management: clear all button, casing and format normalization, edge case styling
• Config Split for Algolia settings and environment variable management
• RevWar entity indexing and map field integration (ABT-906)
• Loading indicator (ABT-912)
• Query suggestions integration
• Search result weighting and relevance tuning

Educator Portal Search

I also built the educator portal search as a separate Algolia integration (ABT-867). This included a resource search block and template, desktop and responsive theming, facet preprocessing that merges Historical and Battle maps into a single facet, background styling, and button/keypress handlers.

Ongoing Maintenance

Since the initial search build, I have continued contributing to the broader ABT site with 221 total commits across the main repo. This includes bug fixes across multiple tickets, media modal fixes, megamenu updates, and search term corrections.