Whitehouse.gov finds familiar power

Mon, 2009-10-26 21:26 by Hans

By Jamie Monday Oct 26, 2009 12:00pm

If you have gone to whitehouse.gov since Saturday you may not have noticed any real changes. On the outside this is true, but underneath the hood they just replaced the entire engine and drive train.

When President Obama took over at 1600 Pennsylvania one of the first things he did was order the people who manage the White House website to investigate new software. The outcome was a move from expensive and clunky proprietary software to a very familiar open source system – Drupal.

Now I don’t expect all our readers to know what Drupal is, but actually it should be very familiar. Drupal is the same software that powers Crooks and Liars [and also elephanttrust.org, the web site you are reading right now]. The software is extremely robust and can be extended beyond your imagination through contributed modules. In the coming months you will see more examples of this as we start rolling out …

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Whitehouse.gov

Fri, 2009-10-30 21:51 by Donna

Thank you, Hans; as an American I find this news very exciting. I knew Obama wanted the system modernized. And so it will be!

elephanttrust.org also runs on Drupal

Sat, 2009-10-31 10:12 by Hans

The insiders here of course knew it all along, but I wanted to let everybody else know too that this web site, elephanttrust.org, has also been running on Drupal for several years already. The decision of the president's office reassures us that we made a good choice.

Background information: Drupal is a very flexible open-source CMS (Content Management System), developed by its founder and a core group of developers and supported by a worldwide community of programmers who assist in improving and extending it.

One of the main points of a CMS like this is that everybody can contribute to the content of the web site, which, I hope, we are putting to good use.

Technical background: A typical Drupal web site like ours is generated by these components:

Apache web server, forwards user input to Drupal installations or other web sites, compresses and sends out web pages
Individual web site design and configuration, uses Drupal
Drupal (Content Management System), uses PHP
PHP programming language and runtime system, uses MySQL and Linux
MySQL database, contains all Drupal web pages, uses Linux
Linux operating system, controls and uses computer hardware
Rack-mounted computer in a large computer center (ours is currently in Germany), linked to the Internet with high-speed data lines, carrying several web sites at the same time, some of which may be (and are in our case) based on Drupal

ATE

Today's:

Whitehouse.gov finds familiar power

Whitehouse.gov

elephanttrust.org also runs on Drupal

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