Whitehouse.gov moves to Drupal
This has been big news recently that Whitehouse.gov has moved to using the Opensource Drupal system. The Opensource advocates have been pretty excited that this heralds a new dawn in deploying Opensource solutions in Government.
I am not saying that Drupal is a bad choice and in many ways it makes sense. Tim O’Reilly as always has a great overview of this decision. I don’t really know anything about Drupal and I am not against using Opensource as this blog and the Ardent iSys site uses Wordpress which is a great solution for content managed sites.
However, what seems to have been lost is that another high profile US Government site actually went from using Drupal to using Sharepoint, namely the Recovery.gov site which is meant to highlight how the stimulus money is being spent by the US Government. It is interesting to read the reasons for this choice although this switch has not been cheap costing $18 million. However, I have not heard how much the Whitehouse site switch cost?