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While there’s not much difference on the surface, the White House’s content management system has moved to the open source Drupal platform. It may not lower unemployment or strengthen the economy, but it’s still change that geeks can believe in.Up until recently, the WhiteHouse.gov site ran on its own proprietary content management system. In addition to it being a huge waste of time to re-code basic features, it also means that the team had to develop every single new feature for the site.

That means that whether the Obama Administration wanted to add new sections or features such as polls or video galleries, it would all have to be built from scratch. This was a huge waste of time and taxpayer dollars with little to no upside.

Then came the Obama Administration’s new media team that decided to move to a more flexible system for managing the site. The Administration called on General Dynamics to find a new CMS solution for WhiteHouse.gov.

Moving to Drupal will allow the White House site to take advantage not only of Drupal’s core content management capabilities, but also the hundreds of modules that provide additional functionality. Not to mention that all of the code provided by the Drupal community is free.

This may not be a great victory for democracy, but it is certainly meaningful for open source software as a whole. At one time many government entities shied away from open source code for fear of back-doors or shoddy craftsmanship, but not any longer.

In this case open source software proved to be the most robust, flexible and the best value even for such an important Web presence as for WhiteHouse.gov. Drupal founder Dries Buytaert calls it, “something all of us in the community should be very proud of.”

The only possibility more exciting would be if the WhiteHouse.gov team were to start contributing code back to the Drupal community. The move onto the Drupal platform is still a great first step.

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