Since the federal government stopped issuing .gov URLs in June, former Federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra suggested the government may want to consolidate sites down to a single, giant federal website.

While creating one federal website is doable, it would be inefficient to shutter websites that are working well, argues Joseph Wykes, president of XML-based web content management system Percussion Software.

"There are technologies in place and web applications in place that today are not broken," says Wykes. "Replacing what's in place for the sake of it might be more expensive than the benefit of having one central, consolidated platform addressing everybody's needs."

Wykes is trying to make the case for a uniform backend--rather than a uniform citizen-facing interface--that could be achieved through the use of more interoperable systems.

"If you natively are able to take content from a variety of different sources from inside your organization and from other third-party organizations, normalize it and then easily reuse it and redeploy it across a variety of targets, sites and channels, your efficiency gain is dramatic," he says.

The Health and Human Services Department, for example, has begun syndicating some content into a central cloud environment so it can then be referenced for populating blocks of content across a variety of sites, he says.  

A key factor in web content reuse is the structure of the site, says Wykes. Coupled WCMs, such as Drupal, Joomla and Plone combine the content repository and presentation layer. Decoupled WCMs, on the other hand, have content repositories separate from the presentation layer, and in Wykes' opinion, this makes content reuse easier. Decoupled WCMs include Alfresco, Nuxeo and Percussion.

The undeniable surge in Drupal adoption for government websites need not present a barrier for sharing across sites, however. Drupal is ideal for creating widget-like functionality within a decoupled architecture, says Wykes.

"There's a real opportunity for organizations to utilize Drupal, it's a very good social publishing platform. It's a really great environment to collaborate," he says.

If the government can move toward a decoupled architecture, however, it will allow for more agile content delivery, better integration with existing solutions and incremental changes as needed, argues Wykes.

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