The White House has announced that it will be using the free Drupal document control system for its whitehouse.gov website.
As techpresident.com reports, the U.S. White House changed its Web presence, which previously used a proprietary solution dating from the Bush era, to the Drupal open source content management system (CMS). With the change, the White House wanted to put the most current Internet technologies to better use and react to them more quickly. The website should also become more secure. The change is transparent so far as how the whitehouse.gov site appears visually.
The U.S. administration has thus made its first major step into the open source direction, as anticipated by numerous free software proponents the spring of 2009 when Obama appointed Aneesh Paul Chopra, the former secretary of technology for the state of Virginia, as the administration's CTO. Other administration projects should follow, according to the Associated Press. As they report:
"White House officials described the change as similar to rebuilding the foundation of a building without changing the street-level appearance of the facade. It was expected to make the White House site more secure -- and the same could be true for other administration sites in the future."
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