Yesterday, the new media team at the White House announced via the Associated Press that whitehouse.gov is now running on Drupal, the open source content management system used by PAGINAR.NET in its websites and specially in "Collaborative Platform", the PAGINAR.NET solution for government portals in Spain and Argentina.
Particularly telling are the reasons that the White House made the switch. According to the AP article:
“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....
Having the public write code may seem like a security risk, but it's just the opposite, experts inside and outside the government argued. Because programmers collaborate to find errors or opportunities to exploit Web code, the final product is therefore more secure.”
More than just security, though, the White House saw the opportunity to increase their flexibility. Drupal has a huge library of user-contributed modules that will provide functionality the White House can use to expand its social media capabilities, with everything from super-scalable live chats to multi-lingual support.
A big IT deployment like this requires especial considerations in terms of infrastructure in order to attend a high volume of visitors and activity. In order to fulfill this need the website uses Akamai as CDN (Content Delivery Network), the same solution that PAGINAR.NET uses for high-end Drupal deployments.
Original AP Cable: Link
