The White House re-launched its website on Drupal. Can you believe that? Not sure why this blows my mind. In searching the web however, I see many others have also sat up and taken notice.
No doubt the White House has content to manage. Sure.
But I think the reason it's so unexpected is that Drupal is simply too cool & cutting edge for the White House .. which we normally associate with stodginess and somnolent formality.
Then there's the fact that Drupal is not an American product. It was born in Belgium, at the University of Ghent (.. as a message board for fellow-students enrolled there).
And you know how RADICAL college students can be. Downright revolutionary at times.
It could also be that we associate politicians with being less-than-honest about their true intentions .. while Drupal is open source, and therefore completely transparent. (Imagine how people might feel if Hitler were caught parading around town wearing a scarf knitted by Mother Teresa.)
Dare I mention how the government TAKES your money .. without even a thank-you note, and gives it to people who have much too much already. While Drupal, released under GPL, is better than free (as in 'free beer'), cuz it's also open source (free as in 'freedom').
The whole thing feels grossly incongruent .. as tho two vastly different worlds have collided. Matter and anti-matter. Good omen, tho .. for both the White House and Drupal.
••• today's entry continues here below •••
I was looking for word on Drupal 7 when I stumbled upon this info. I normally install a new version of Drupal with every release .. to familiarize myself (beginning with v5, in May 2007). Currently have version 6.x installed » here.
They've been doing lots of work on Drupal 7. It will be a MAJOR step. D7 has been in code-freeze since September, but no official release date has been announced. Interesting that Drupal 7 will break compatibility with PHP 4. That took guts. (The Rad VPS is running PHP v5.2.5)
There's something trippy about George Washington and Abraham Lincoln living on Drupal. It's gonna take me a while to get used to the idea.
Seems the Bush administration had installed an expensive proprietary system, but Obama said he needed something better.
The White has been posting some great photos. They have access to behind-the-scenes content you simply can't find/get anywhere else (.. unless you're a Secret Service agent). I'm jealous. Generating unique content is (to me) what a website should be all about.
Drupal is a leading open source (free) content management system (CMS). Like many other CMS's, Drupal is written in PHP. There are literally hundreds of CMS's to choose from .. tho not all are written in PHP, nor are all free.
They claim you don't need to know PHP to use Drupal, but obviously it would help, especially if you wanted to customize. (And who wouldn't?) eDawg says PHP is easy to learn.
I think Joomla is actually the most popular CMS, because it's easier to learn. More importantly, it's easier to make a Joomla site look pretty. (Joomla was born in Australia.)
But Drupal is known for having better/more functionality. I've never installed Joomla. Joomla is preferred by designers, while Drupal by developers (coders, programmers).
Drupal also wins more awards than any other CMS. Tho as time passes, Joomla is becoming more like Drupal and Drupal more like Joomla, as each takes steps to address their respective weaknesses.
Both are very powerful applications. Few sites will be be able to use either to its full capability .. which is why I looked into MODx. (Revolution is scheduled to be released later this month.) Still, it's nice to familiarize yourself with state-of-the-art technologies.
Following personal research in April 2007, I posted my findings regarding a comparison of » Joomla vs Drupal, which received many compliments .. where I concluded that Drupal was a better option (.. even tho Joomla was more popular). The White House, it seems, concurs.
For more along these lines, here's a Google search preconfigured for the query » obama white house web site drupal cms content management system
