Why WhiteHouse.gov chose Drupal

When the White House jumped on the open-source bandwagon and chose Drupal for managing the back-end of WhiteHouse.gov, the decision made headlines. Rob Klause, the man behind the Drupal transition, who has since left government to work for Siteworx, spoke about the decision to use Drupal at a Web Managers Roundtable in Washington, D.C. on March 25.

From the minute President Obama walked into the White House it was clear that the web team would have to rethink their strategy. "Branding is what the Obama administration and campaign team are all about," said Klause. The new administration also had greater demands for connecting with constituents and using rich media. "We couldn't keep up with what the new media team wanted," he said.

The WhiteHouse.gov team needed a fully functional content management system with an improved workflow and blogging features. Klause also wanted to be able to create new content types on the fly and add community-building features. Klause decided it would be helpful to go with a platform with an active and innovative community. "We needed a system with agility and to me, innovation happens in the open-source communities," explained Klause.

Once the team decided on Drupal, they were able to address one of their biggest problem areas: Slideshows. With the old CMS, slideshows were difficult to produce and hard for users to find.

"Reaching out to the Drupal community, we found there are quite a few models available to put together that slideshow component," said Klause. "It turns out that this community has taken that idea and run with it. They've not just done your slideshow, they've thought about it further." Some options provided by the Drupal community were the addition of video, text captions, making slideshows search engine optimization friendly and reusing slideshow content effectively across the site.

But having so many options can sometimes present another set of challenges. Tony Byrne, an analyst from the Real Story Group, which evaluates and compares content management technologies, cautioned that tools such as Drupal can be overwhelming for users.

"The thing that made [Drupal] different initially was that it was designed to be a community platform where visitors are authors. What's missing in all of that is the presence of 'enterprise-y' features," said Byrne. If users are looking for something, "most Drupal developers will tell you, 'Well, there's a module for that.' But you have to do your due diligence to make sure you choose those wisely."

The cost-savings may be the clincher for government agencies, though. In December the Department of Commerce released an RFI for an open-source web CMS. Klause explained that there were savings associated with choosing Drupal over other platforms, however the savings weren't as significant as he had expected. "We thought we would see tons of savings in terms of developer hours...we were looking more at configuration than coding. Still, review, testing and implementation takes time," he said. The biggest savings were actually gained from licensing benefits: Cost effectively scaling and adding sites, adding users, and being able to share the site as a template with other agencies.

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