Whitehouse.gov Goes Drupal

Some exciting news within the Drupal community emerged this past week. Whitehouse.gov went Drupal, according to the Personal Democracy Forum, the AP, and other extremely important news sources that you may or may not have heard of or care about.

According to a source of a source of the Obama Administration, the White House has spent months planning for the switch to the open-source Drupal platform from the proprietary CMS that the Bush Administration had utilized for the past eight years. The switch came after the Obama new media team decided that a more malleable development environment was needed for the White House website. Drupal provided them with a quicker, easier, and more graceful solution for their vision for interactive government.

General Dynamics Information Technology (GDIT), the Virginia-based government contractor who executed the Bush-era White House website, was asked by the new administration to find a more flexible alternative. The ideal features they wanted to implement focused on question-and-answer forums, live video streaming, and collaborative tools that work seamlessly with the site’s overall infrastructure. Phase2 Technology is responsible for the requirements, development, and deployment of the site, which literally means they built it. Great job fellas! Our good friends and Drupal specialist firm Acquia is also working with the White House on the project as a subcontractor.

This appears to be nothing short of a White House seal of approval and a victory for Drupal and open source platforms everywhere. It is also possible that the White House’s move to Drupal and the open-source platform is a move towards a collaborative programming that can support and inspire a more distributed political climate. Politics crafted by the people can be a powerful thing.