The White House Uses Drupal. Yes, You Can Too
30 10 2009
According to Bits, the technology blog of the NYTimes.com, WhiteHouse.gov is built in Drupal, a free and open source Content Management System (CMS) written in PHP and distributed under the GNU General Public License (Wikipedia).
To some, the White House shift to Drupal from a proprietary software package represented a serious seal of approval for open-source software. [...] Companies like Nike, Warner Bros. and Yahoo use Drupal for various parts of their Web sites. All told, close to 500,000 Drupal-based sites are on the Web, according to Thomas Erickson, the chief executive of Acquia (Bits).
To me it is no surprise and this should ring a bell for some web development companies that charge big money to their clients for their services. Drupal and other open source software allow a scalability that it is hard to achieve with some customized products without breaking the bank.
Do not be intimidated by the White House embracing the use of open source. Yes, you can too. Actually, look at this as an endorsement.
Great to see Drupal continue it’s rise. We’ve been using it since early 2005 and it’s been a fantastically useful tool. It bridges the gap between a normal blogging engine and a full-blown programming framework: Easy to get a basic site running with the minimum of fuss, but powerful enough to build quite funky features.
Although there’s a bit of learning curve, we’ve found it quite straightforward to put together web applications with fairly sophisticated features. The Drupal community is generally friendly and makes that learning curve much less painful that it could be.