House.gov decided to transfer to Drupal

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    The popular open source CMS, and more recently, a web application development environment, Drupal continues to attack the US government’s IT departments. The House of Representatives (lower house of the US Congress) has chosen Drupal as the preferred management system for its web presence , House.gov . Thus, the so-called “People’s House” is becoming one of the largest state institutions that have switched to an open source web content management system.

    This step was taken after a series of transitions 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 switching to Drupal, while it will take time to “move” the House.gov site itself, and this, according to representatives of the chamber, will happen in the next few months. In essence, House.gov is a huge portal that leads visitors to more than 520 websites that operate in a single domain. Each individual office has its own website in a third-level domain, with its own budget and suppliers, which is integrated into the infrastructure of the main portal.

    The administration of House.gov expects to save money by switching to Drupal, as they will be able to manage the infrastructure themselves, and platform members will pay solution providers for development on their own.

    As one representative of the lower house of the congress administration said, the Drupal platform was chosen because it is open source and has already received widespread recognition around the world, which allows anyone who is a member of House.gov to use the power of a large community of programmers, which gives them the broadest field for empowerment and innovation. At the same time, it is noted that those members of the chamber who wish will be able to continue to use other platforms for their web representations.

    But congressmen and congressmen quite readily transfer their personal sites to Drupal. System templates have been 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, 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 fad, and considers it possible to enable this option quite naturally.

    The population is now increasingly using the Web to access government information, wanting more and more diverse data and services. Therefore, now every well-respected government official should have a well-designed, user-friendly and attractive website with convenient links to social media.

    via O'Reilly , TechPresident

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