White House Website Built in Drupal

When you’ve been building web systems for as long as we have, it is nice to see and know when you’ve made the right decision.

We recently relaunched our website using Drupal (in addition to launching several other sites in Drupal as well) and that decision came as a result of research into this 8 years young, open source platform. Drupal has allowed for us to harness the efforts of the open source development community and quickly build complex websites in a very short amount of time, while preserving, enhancing and expanding the list of features and functionality contained within. Turns out, this month the White House also relaunched its website using guess what? Drupal. This past weekend MSNBC reported the launch of the new whitehouse.gov website using Drupal as the platform of choice.

It has been said that using open source has inherent risks associated since no one person or organization owns the code, however, when properly implemented, even a website that requires the highest level of security has managed to use open source to its full potential. Plus, the simple fact that the code is available to the public means that there are just as many folks, if not more, working to secure it as those who are looking to crack it. We have known for quite some time that open-source has plenty of advantages (having built and maintained systems in Zope, dabbled with Mambo – which is now known as Joomla, built a plethora of custom systems using the ubiquitous LAMP stack to even embedding Python into our own custom CMS platform) and it is refreshing to see that our decisions match those of other respected thought leaders and is making headway into mainstream web development.