How do you empower a 300-year-old Ivy League institution to manage thousands of websites without losing brand consistency or usability? You build a platform that scales — and evolves — with its people. In partnership with Four Kitchens, Yale created YaleSites: a powerful Drupal-based platform that gives every department, program, and team the tools they need to tell their story, stay on brand, and embrace the future of digital content — all with less effort, more impact, and a stronger sense of connection across the University.
Reimagining a first-of-its-kind platform
In 2010, Four Kitchens partnered with Yale to launch the original version of YaleSites — one of the first large-scale, Drupal-based website platforms in higher education. It set a new standard for how universities could centralize web infrastructure while allowing departments the flexibility to control their own content.
More than a decade later, Yale returned to that same partnership with a bold new vision: to modernize and future-proof the platform for the next generation of digital content. The result is a complete reimagining of YaleSites — rebuilt from the ground up to reflect today’s standards in accessibility, performance, and user experience.
The new YaleSites is more than a redesign. It’s a thoughtful evolution of a groundbreaking idea, designed to scale across thousands of websites, empower non-technical users, and maintain a consistent, on-brand presence across Yale’s vast digital landscape — all while leveraging the power of open source.
Launching a comprehensive ecosystem powered by open source
Yale set out to build an innovative publishing platform using open-source technologies to transform content creation, management, and delivery. The goal: give every team across campus the power to create great digital experiences with minimal support from IT.
Content creators can now manage their work in one place and publish it widely, ensuring information reaches the Yale community faster and more consistently than ever.
Complementing the Drupal foundation are tools like Emulsify, a design system toolkit that produces accessible, brand-aligned components, and CKEditor 5, an intuitive, feature-rich editor for managing content.
Together, these tools form the backbone of YaleSites’ out-of-the-box starter kit — a launchpad for building Yale-approved websites with flexibility and ease.
Emulsify and Yale: Redefining digital collaboration and brand unity
Emulsify brings the power of choice to YaleSites. As the design system powering the platform, it enables every site to look and feel like Yale — while still allowing for unique expression.
With Emulsify, Yale established a component-based design system built on design tokens and modular architecture. This allows designers and developers to work in harmony, accelerating project timelines and reducing inconsistencies.
Emulsify is built on modern, open-source principles, making it easy to maintain, extend, and align with evolving standards across platforms.
Every component and variant is built with accessibility in mind. Automated and manual testing — including real users with disabilities — ensures compliance with WCAG standards and best practices.
The result? Thousands of Yale sites that are distinct in purpose and personality yet unified in design, usability, and accessibility. Every site reflects the individuality of its department or program — while staying aligned with Yale’s brand standards and digital accessibility requirements.
AI at Yale: Supporting students, staff, and faculty 24/7
What started as a chatbot for dining menus has grown into a powerful AI-driven platform for finding information across Yale’s digital ecosystem. Yale’s AI chatbots help students and staff get answers fast — whether they’re looking for vegan dining options, faculty directories, or benefits information.
Four Kitchens helped design the content structure and conversational experience to ensure the AI delivers accurate results. For example, during early tests, the chatbot listed chicken nuggets as a vegan option — because the content wasn’t structured clearly. By applying content best practices and improving authoring workflows, the team ensured the AI could deliver accurate, helpful answers.
Today, Yale’s AI chatbots are in use across multiple Yale properties, including Yale Health, and serves as a blueprint for future integrations. The goal is to allow any YaleSite to “flip a switch” and enable a site-specific chatbot trained on its own content.
Whether navigating benefits or planning a visit to a museum, users now have a new way to interact with Yale’s digital presence — one that’s accessible, efficient, and intuitive.
A platform built to grow, not just launch
YaleSites isn’t just a CMS — it’s a product with a roadmap, a governance model, and a community.
Instead of one-off features for individual departments, YaleSites emphasizes scalability. When a unique need arises — like a new content component — it’s reviewed for broader value. If it benefits the larger community, it’s added to the core platform. This means every improvement helps the entire institution.
Over time, this approach has eliminated hacky workarounds like CSS or JavaScript injectors. Site owners now have access to pre-built tools and sensible defaults that align with Yale’s identity while still allowing for flexibility through point-and-click customization.
Yale University
Working with Four Kitchens has been great. This has been the best partnership that I have personally worked on.
—April Tiddei, UX Analyst
The results
In solving Yale’s digital fragmentation, the project delivered long-term impact across departments, disciplines, and digital properties:
- Thousands of websites launched on a single, scalable Drupal platform that empowers the entire Yale community — from individual departments to major institutions.
- A flexible design system rooted in Yale’s historic brand identity, enabling every site to feel unique while staying on-brand and accessible.
- Self-service tools and templates that empower users to create pages and manage content without needing technical expertise — dramatically reducing reliance on IT support and minimizing clicks to publish.
- A sustainable component library with built-in accessibility and UX best practices, rigorously tested by both automated tools and real users — including people with disabilities.
- A culture of governance and continuous improvement, where user needs drive platform evolution, and enhancements benefit the entire community instead of being implemented as one-off exceptions.
- Strong foundations for AI integration across Yale’s digital properties, with chatbots now in use and a roadmap for broader deployment across YaleSites.
YaleSites isn’t just a CMS or page-builder — it’s a digital ecosystem that helps the Yale community focus less on building websites and more on telling their stories.
The details
Services provided
- Accessibility compliance and testing, both automated and human-tested directly with users with disabilities
- Development
- Testing and QA
- Design system and component library creation and governance
- User experience
- Content strategy
- SEO and AI optimization of content
- Documentation and training
- Messaging and communication support to facilitate change management
Technologies used
- Drupal
- CKEditor 5
- Emulsify design system (includes Storybook and Webpack)
- Azure Chat Solution Accelerator powered by Azure Open AI Service
Ready to build what’s next?
If your organization is ready to scale digital experiences across departments while maintaining brand, accessibility, and ease of use, let’s talk. We’d love to help you build your next platform — or reinvent the one you already have.