Slate on Drupal in the Whitehouse: "A disaster waiting to happen"
Howdy mates, I think this is what they call a shot across the bows:
"Why running the White House Web site on Drupal is a political disaster waiting to happen"
By Chris Wilson
Posted Tuesday, Oct. 27, 2009, at 3:21 PM ETIn yet another repudiation of its predecessor, the Obama administration this week migrated the White House Web site to Drupal, the popular open-source Web site management software. By dumping the Bush administration's proprietary system and embracing software authored by the community and available to everyone, the consensus holds, the White House embodies the very essence of the new politics...
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Other "Thoughts on the Whitehouse.gov switch to Drupal"
by Tim O'Reilly
"Yesterday, the new media team at the White House announced via the Associated Press that whitehouse.gov is now running on Drupal, the open source content management system. That Drupal implementation is in turn running on a Red Hat Linux system with Apache, MySQL and the rest of the LAMP stack. Apache Solr is the new White House search engine.
This move is obviously a big win for open source. As John Scott of Open Source for America (a group advocating open source adoption by government, to which I am an advisor) noted in an email to me: "This is great news not only for the use of open source software, but the validation of the open source development model. The White House's adoption of community-based software provides a great example for the rest of the government to follow."
More:
http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/10/whitehouse-switch-drupal-opensource.html
The Slate article is pretty
The Slate article is pretty biased, if you ask me. He makes some valid points about the learning curve and Drupal challenges, but it's a very one-sided article. It doesn't acknowledge the equal and often greater challenges with other open source CMSs. And it doesn't offer any alternatives.
After closely following the space since 2001, I chose Drupal in 2005--in part due to the Howard Dean Campaign validation. While I have had and continue to have my challenges with the system, I find my choice is increasingly validated by the advancements in the platform, the maturing of its ecosystem and the visible gains in adoption.
Clearly, Drupal is not for everyone. I still recommend Joomla and other systems on some occasions, but more often than not, I think Drupal is as good or better than any other option.
Erik Britt-Webb
erik@britt-webb.net
drupal2008@ebrittwebb.com
US Gov't
The Department of Education is doing something significant with Drupal. I was contacted by a recruiter recently about contract positions there. The Smithsonian will be rolling out several Drupal sites in the coming months with potentially more to come. The Coming Soon Oceans Portal will be a Drupal site. http://ocean.si.edu/ocean_hall. I would think this will increase the demand even more, and stretch even more thin the available developer resources. It's a good time to be a Drupal developer. I know the economy isn't doing so well overall, but I haven't noticed it, and sites like these should keep things rolling for a while yet.
http://www.informationweek.co
http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2009/10/whitehousegov_...
Article about that article, made it to front page of digg (not top 10, just front page)