Whitehouse.gov is now running a version of Drupal, the popular open-source content management system. This is not only exciting news for Open Source advocates, but also for myself and everyone here at GreenLite. As you may know, every website we ship is built on Drupal. Having the White House move its website to Drupal validates something that GreenLite already knew - Drupal rocks.
Visitors to the White House site may not notice the change - the look and feel remain the same. But news outlets and Drupal founder Dries Buytaert have confirmed that the site is running Drupal.
So what's the big deal? Open Source software is developed by people all over the world, usually for free. Because it's free, this software sometimes gets negatively portrayed as being cheap or shoddy. While this may be true of some Open Source projects, a vast majority are just as polished as commercial applications that do the same thing. Drupal falls into this category. Thousands of developers, myself included, have contributed features and bug fixes to improve Drupal. To have a site as visible as whitehouse.gov running Drupal is a big indication that the Drupal community is doing something right.