Drupal in Government – WhiteHouse.gov
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
- 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.