WhiteHouse.gov Goes Drupal
Yesterday, after months of planning the new media team at the White House announced via the Associated Press that whitehouse.gov is now running on Drupal, the open source content management system. That Drupal implementation is in turn running on a Red Hat Linux system with Apache, MySQL and the rest of the LAMP stack. Apache Solr is the new White House search engine.
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.
Drupal originally written by Dries Buytaert as a message board, Drupal became an open source project in 2001. Drupal is a free and open source Content Management System (CMS) written in PHP and distributed under the GNU General Public License. It is used as a back-end system for many different types of websites, ranging from small personal blogs to Enterprise 2.0 collaboration and knowledge management uses to large corporate and political sites.
According to White House new media director Macon Phillips, they have contract with GDIT (General Dynamics Information Technology) and the Drupal specialist firm Acquia is also working with the White House on the project as a subcontractor. They are both open-source software practitioners and experts in keeping systems up and running.
That’s something of a victory for the Drupal (not to mention open-source) community .
W.Chris is a professional blogger, internet marketeer, gadget lover and Freelance programmer. He launched this site in 2008.
