Oxford Fresco will be a stable, secure and flexible web content management system (CMS) for the University, allowing content owners to manage their online content and build websites without needing to write any code.
Oxford Fresco will provide improved, flexible tooling for content owners and creators to deliver quality sites for wide-ranging audience needs. It will replace the Mosaic platform, which goes out of support in 2026. The project is working to provide a best-in-class solution to ensure that user journeys across the University’s web estate can provide the best digital experience possible for our audiences by optimising content, design and user experience.
This 'future proofing' will ensure we have ongoing support and ease future upgrades.
While the aim is to create a University-wide platform, initially this will impact those sites currently on Drupal 7-based Mosaic.
Fresco Development and Launch
The WebCMS team have been working on developing Fresco and the editor interface, in agile sprints with fortnightly releases. These releases will form larger waves, each of which is a step forward in capabilities of the platform. The first wave will focus on core functionalities, such as content creation and management, aiming to provide a seamless user experience. This wave will be available to pioneers from 23 June 2025. Future waves will introduce more advanced features, ensuring the platform evolves to meet the diverse needs of the University community.
The Fresco wave roadmap is dynamic and will evolve through iterative, agile processes, ensuring that features are refined and enhanced based on user feedback and emerging requirements.
Development, testing, and pilot
Throughout the development of the platform, representatives from across the University have been engaged with to provide user feedback on the platform and prioritisation of upcoming features.
Additionally, our pilot of the new Oxford Fresco platform ran from March to June 2024 and enabled us to evaluate our proposed technical solution and gain a greater understanding of the nature and extent of the change and what that will mean for colleagues across the University.
The areas represented on the pilot were:
- Bodleian Library - Gardens Libraries and Museums
- Primary Care Health Sciences, Medical Sciences
- History Faculty, Humanities
- Department for Continuing Education
- Kellogg College
- Research Support Team, IT Services, UAS
- CMS Platform Team, IT Services, UAS
The positive result of the pilot has enabled the continued development of the platform and contributed user insights into build areas and priorities.
Project Governance
The project falls under the governance for the Transforming Oxford’s Digital Communications Programme. Further information on this is provided on our programme page.
Fresco is developed and run as a product in line with the University’s Digital Delivery model, which you can learn about through this video: Transforming how we deliver digital services at Oxford
Further Information
If you have any further questions, please check our Frequently Asked Questions or, if you are unable to find what you need there, please email us at transforming digitalcommsprogramme@it.ox.ac.uk
Each month, we are releasing a video overview of the latest development features in Fresco. You can watch the recording of this demo for May 2025:
https://unioxfordnexus.sharepoint.com/sites/ITServices-DTCommunicationsStrategyworkstreams/_layouts/15/embed.aspx?UniqueId=3e977a3b-f589-4ea1-83fc-75d1880fbe6f&embed=%7B%22ust%22%3Atrue%2C%22hv%22%3A%22CopyEmbedCode%22%7D&referrer=StreamWebApp&referrerScenario=EmbedDialog.Create
Archive of previous presentations
Presentation slides:
13/14 December 2023
19 February 2024
17 April 2024
