White House opens Web site programming to public

[DannyGSmith]

I am sad they went with Drupal instead of WordPress.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5iuRIVBTLUvW7823FC-fcfhvkSxHgD9BHLF180

I hope this thread can stay on the technical side, not politics.

What little I used drupal, it seems like a poor choice to me. At least when I used it, it was very limiting.

[Ryan]

Lol, that article was definitely written by someone not in the web dev. industry.

The online-savvy administration on Saturday switched to open-source code for http://www.whitehouse.gov — meaning the programming language is written in public view, available for public use and able for people to edit.

Is it just me, or does that make it sound like you can go in and start editing their PHP scripts? That would certainly make for some interesting security issues!

[DannyGSmith]

You are so right about that, I expected them to bring Stallman up at any moment as if he was still a big player.

Is it just me, or does that make it sound like you can go in and start editing their PHP scripts? That would certainly make for some interesting security issues!

I have seen people do that, and learn to regret it.

[Ryan]

I am sad they went with Drupal instead of WordPress.
...
What little I used drupal, it seems like a poor choice to me. At least when I used it, it was very limiting.

To be honest, I wouldn't have chosen WordPress for a project like this either.

I assume they have many administrators working together to keep the site maintained and have a significant number of static pages. Unfortunately WordPress sucks royally when it comes to handling user permissions (ie: handling many users with different permissions for various parts of the site) and at managing large numbers of static pages.

Drupal, Joomla etc. have far better support for that type of thing.

You could of course add that functionality in via plugins but that would have required them custom building quite a lot of it which would remove many of the benefits for them in using open source software.

[DannyGSmith]

But wouldn't MU be fine for that, delegate different parts to different people?

[Ryan]

No, WordPress Mu does not give you the same fine-grained control over what content various users can edit.

[Ryan]

Barrack Obama used SilverStripe last year:

http://www.silverstripe.com/2008-dem...nal-convention

[andrea_r]

Yeah, MU only gives regular control to each blog for each admin. I wouldn't have used MU for it either.

I mean, it *could* be done... but that woudl be like using a hammer when you really needed a screwdriver.

[JohnM]

White House on Drupal is great also for WP. Its a nice selling point that OS CMS is used on such hi-profile sites. We have White House on Drupal and Nr.10 on WordPress and Brazilian culture ministry on WPMU and Buddypress.