Last Saturday, the Obama White House completed a changeover of the WhiteHouse.gov website to run on the open-source platform Drupal. The much-ballyhooed switch was hailed as a giant leap for openness, abandoning as it did the propriety content management system used by the Bush Administration.
But is the shoop over to Drupal a disaster in the making? Chris Wilson over at Slate thinks so, citing five big reasons why Drupal may be duping its champions. His critique is a bit thin on examples, but peppered with analogies comparing the software to gov employees. Example: "If Drupal were an employee of the federal government, it would be the
person who answers the phone at Immigration and Customs Enforcement who
is unable to help you and unable to tell you who can."
That's not to say Wilson is barking up the wrong tree. Recovery.gov was a droopy Drupal site for many months before recently being re-launched with an $18 million proprietary back-end system. (Read OhMyGov's interview with the developers here). We'll all be watching closely to see whether the move to Drupal works out better for the White House than it did for the Recovery.gov team.
Have experiences with Drupal? Think the White House is doing the right thing? Let us know.
