About a month ago we started to see some announcements from Ning that made us wonder whether trouble was brewing. Today Ning announced the end of their long time free online community service and a cut of nearly half of their staff. Although this bodes well for other online community platforms, there are a lot of nervous Ning customers out there today – some of our clients included.
Given today’s events, I thought I would take a moment to discuss one of the core values of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS): Free. As in Libre.
It doesn’t look much different than it did a month ago, but under the hood the most prominent website in U.S. government is now running the open source Drupal content management system. This apparently replaces an unknown proprietary CMS that was implemented during the Bush Administration.
On the heels of the high-profile Recovery.gov Drupal site launched earlier in the year, this is another big win for the Open Source community and an important stamp of approval for the Drupal system. Seeing a site with this level of prominence leverage Open Source technology will be noticed by governments and corporations around the world where Open Source has traditionally been looked at as not polished enough and not secure enough for mission critical operations. For direct web communications with the U.S. people, WhiteHouse.gov is about as mission critical as it gets.
Having worked through dozens of projects on Open Source content management systems, the government’s Drupal choice is not at all surprising. The evolution of the platform from it’s political roots during the Dean Campaign in 2004 is just extraordinary. Today, there is not much you can’t do on the platform with it’s robust developer API and with the thousands of modules contributed to the project by the community.
Although we don’t have access to all the specific Drupal modules in place (I’d love to see it), we did notice a few interesting tidbits via a look at the page source:
- Related blog posts appear to be handled by the Views module (no surprise there)
- The popular AddThis link sharing service is being used
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WebTrends is keeping track of your visits (Sorry, Google Analytics)
- The beautiful slideshow on the homepage is built with jQuery
- Contributed module Galleria is getting some use in the Photo Galleries
- And in case you were wondering, yes, the robots.txt file is still only two lines long, slightly shorter than 2,400 present during the prior Administration
Have you uncovered more details? Let us know in the comments. It’ll be interesting to see how this site evolves in the coming months and years knowing that Drupal is under the hood.
Update 10/26/2009 – More Open Source in government. The SEC’s Investor.gov site launched a few days ago on WordPress, our other favorite platform.
CMS Wire and Water & Stone released their on April 9th, 2009 in Content Management Systems and Featured and Strategy. 4 Comments
I’ve been working with website content management systems for 9 years or so – since the last time our economy took a bit of a nose-dive. Around that time there was a flood of discussion about the ROI of implementing a Content Management System (CMS), mostly written by vendors trying to sell very expensive software in a down market. We’re in a similar economic situation now, but over the past 9 years two big things have changed:
- The cost of CMS software has decreased exponentially since 2000
- Site visitor expectations have increased exponentially since 2000
Continue reading Content Management System (CMS) ROI – Not Just About Cutting Costs Anymore
We talk a lot about WordPress, but it’s not the only open source content management system we work with. Just last month we rolled out a Drupal powered site for the San Francisco based Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE).
After electing to go open source, BALLE was drawn to Drupal’s ability to blend public and member only features into a unified website. With a healthy repository of plug-ins, Drupal offered a lot of value out of the box, while still allowing substantial control to the development team.
Continue reading Drupal website development: BALLE