Research Publisher Implementation Report

What Was Built

The repository now contains a reusable publishing package, a seed Visual Engineering research corpus, a second fixture project, Astro layouts and styles, Pagefind search integration, generated inventory/diagnostic outputs, and GitHub workflows for validation and deployment.

Architecture

The package discovers and normalizes Markdown, writes JSON build data, renders the site through Astro, then indexes the output with Pagefind. The public metadata catalog and relationship graph are generated independently from search.

Repository Changes

• Promoted the repository root to the reusable engine boundary so the package can be consumed directly from Git.
• Added research-publisher.config.mjs and a second fixture config.
• Added sample research content under research/ and fixtures/alt-research/content/.
• Added documentation and workflow automation.

Commands

• npm ci
• npm run research:inventory
• npm run research:validate
• npm run research:build
• npm run research:build:fixture
• npm test

Known Limitations

• Migration is a documented dry-run path rather than a full write-back implementation.
• Validation is intentionally lightweight in version 1 and can be tightened over time.
• Search filters are client-side refinements over Pagefind result metadata.