WhiteHouse.Gov Switches to Drupal
The Drupal content management system has friends in high places. The White House has switched over to the popular open source platform on WhiteHouse.Gov, abandoning the proprietary system that had been developed under the Bush administration. Personal Democracy Forum has the details:
The great Drupal switch came about after the Obama new media team, with a few months of executive branch service (and tweaking of WhiteHouse.gov) under their belts, decided they needed a more malleable development environment for the White House web presence. They wanted to be able to more quickly, easily, and gracefully build out their vision of interactive government. General Dynamics Information Technology (GDIT), the Virginia-based government contractor who had executed the Bush-era White House CMS contract, was tasked by the Obama Administration with finding a more flexible alternative. The ideal new platform would be one where dynamic features like question-and-answer forums, live video streaming, and collaborative tools could work more fluidly together with the site’s infrastructure. The solution, says the White House, turned out to be Drupal.
Drupal is a sophisticated publishing platform now in version 6 that was created in 2001 by Dries Buytaert. The software was developed with the PHP programming language and released under the GNU General Public License.
“This is a big day for Drupal, and for Open Source in government, and something all of us in the community should be very proud of,” Buytaert writes. “I’m thrilled by the idea that Drupal can help governments provide greater transparency, higher velocity, and more flexibility.”