House.gov decided to transfer to Drupal

The popular open source CMS, and more recently, the environment for creating web applications - Drupal continues to attack the IT departments of the US government. The House of Representatives (Lower House of Congress) has selected Drupal as the preferred management system for its web site, House.gov . Thus, the so-called “People’s House” is becoming one of the largest public institutions that have switched to an open source web content management system.

This step was followed by a series of links to the open CMS sites of the largest US federal government agencies, including WhiteHouse.gov and the very recent Energy.gov.

The House.gov platform is already moving to Drupal, while it will take time for the “relocation” of House.gov itself, and this, according to representatives of the chamber, will happen in the next few months. In fact, House.gov is a huge portal, leading visitors to more than 520 websites that operate in a single domain. Each separate office has its own website in the third level domain, with its own budget and suppliers, which is integrated into the infrastructure of the main portal.

In the administration, House.gov expects to save money by switching to Drupal, as they can manage the infrastructure themselves, and platform members will pay solution providers for the development themselves.
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As one representative of the administration of the lower house of the US Congress said, the Drupal platform was chosen because it has open source code and has already received wide recognition throughout the world, which allows anyone who is a member of House.gov to use the power of a large community of programmers that gives them the widest field for empowerment and innovation. It is noted that those members of the chamber who wish, can continue to use other platforms for their web offices.

But congressmen and congresswoman quite willingly translate their personal sites on Drupal. The system templates were seen on several official websites of members of the House of Representatives. It is noteworthy that each of the new sites includes standard modules for integration with sites, the leaders of the world of social networks: Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and Facebook. The administration of the House of Representatives notes that integration with social networks in 2011 is not just a tribute to fashion, and considers it possible to enable this option completely natural.

The population is now increasingly turning to government information through the Web, wanting to get more and more diverse data and services. Therefore, now a well-designed, user-friendly and cute web site with convenient links to social media should have every self-respecting authority.

via O'Reilly , TechPresident