WhiteHouse.gov open sources custom Drupal code

During a keynote speech at this year's DrupalCon in San Francisco, David Cole, a Senior Advisor to the CIO of the Executive Office of the President, announced that the US Presidential web site (WhiteHouse.gov) developers are contributing some of their custom code to the Drupal project. In a post on the White House Blog, Cole said that, "This code is available for anyone to review, use, or modify," adding that, "We're excited to see how developers across the world put our work to good use in their own applications."

The news comes six months after announcing that the White House web site would be using the open source Drupal content management system (CMS). The developers hope that, by releasing their code, the community will help to review and improve upon it. According to Cole, the four modules are aimed at improving scalability, communication and accessibility.

The Context HTTP Headers module allows web site builders to add metadata to their content and tells servers how to handle specific pages. The second scaleability module, called Akami, allows the WhiteHouse.gov site to integrate with the Akamai content delivery network. The GovDelivery communication module enables more dynamic emails tailored to users' preferences, while the Node Embed accessibility module makes it easier to manage rich image and video content to meet Section 508 of the government accessibility standard.

See also:

• London.gov.uk switches to Drupal open source CMS, a report from The H.
• Whtehouse.gov goes open source with Drupal, a report from The H.

(crve)