Quickstart 3.0 Upgrade

Oct. 3, 2025
Drupal and Bootrap upgrade

Quickstart 3.0 brings big changes behind the scenes. This release introduces major version upgrades to the two biggest pieces of our distribution: Drupal and Bootstrap.

Drupal 10 to Drupal 11

Drupal is the Open Source Content Management System (CMS) that we use as the base of Arizona Quickstart. Drupal is what provides the admin interface as well as the framework for building out our Arizona specific content types (like Pages, Person, News, Events, etc.), managing Users, and tying all of this together.

Drupal 11 primarily includes developer focused improvements that lay the groundwork for major future improvements. Here are some things that Drupal 11 enables that we will be exploring for future versions of Quickstart:

  • A new admin interface including updated admin navigation.
  • Workspaces that allow you to make major content updates across your site.
  • AI and automation integrations.
  • Recipes that allow for different kinds of pre-packaged configuration (for example: Different configurations for each college? Different configurations for labs vs. departments vs. colleges?)
  • A new page builder called Canvas.

If you'd like to be a part of the UX group that helps us explore these future improvements, fill out this form to join our feedback group.

Bootstrap 4 to Bootstrap 5

Bootstrap is the Open Source style framework that provides all of the basic css and javascript for the display of individual website elements like links, buttons and headings and defines what they look like and how they behave on both desktop and mobile devices when you hover or click on them. These simple components are combined to define more complex components like cards, accordions and photo galleries. How these are laid out on a page and how the layout changes when displayed on different devices is defined by the grid. In Bootstrap 5, all of these things are changing.

With this large technical upgrade, we also took this opportunity to work with the creative team in University Marketing to make some updates to our visual identity. With these two changes taken together, here are some changes that you can expect to see in Arizona Bootstrap 5 that contribute to a more open and friendly design:

  • Larger width grids to give more space for content
  • Higher contrast headings (now Arizona Blue instead of Silver)
  • Pill shaped buttons instead of hard rectangles
  • Rounded edges everywhere
  • Sentence Casing in buttons and links instead of ALL CAPS
  • Improved accessibility throughout

Quickstart 2 to Quickstart 3

The Arizona Digital team has worked extensively over the last few months to incorporate these two major changes to Arizona Quickstart in a way that will allow sites to upgrade directly from 2 to 3 without having to do major site rebuilds. We've gone over all of the elements of Quickstart with a fine toothed comb to ensure that they continue to work as expected with the api changes introduced by Drupal 11 and the style changes introduced by Bootstrap 5, but every site is unique so be sure to review our Quickstart 2 to Quickstart 3 Upgrade Guide for guidelines on how to make sure that your site upgrades cleanly.