The White House: open-source Drupal developer?
By Nate Anderson | Last updated a day ago
Call it a sign of the times: not only is the Obama White House using plenty of open-source software, its technology team is contributing back to the community.
Yesterday, the Senior Advisor to the CIO of the Executive Office of the President, Dave Cole, announced that his team was contributing three new pieces of code to the Drupal content management system, which powers the White House website.
"By releasing some of our code," Cole wrote, "we get the benefit of more people reviewing and improving it."
The White House has released most of its custom work already, but the new release adds three news bits of functionality to the Drupal system. Cole describes them this way:
- Scalability: We're releasing a module called "Context HTTP Headers," which allows site builders to add new metadata to the content they serve. We use this to tell our servers how to handle specific pages, such as "cache this type of page for 15 minutes or that type for 30." A second module that addresses scalability is called "Akamai" and it allows our website to integrate with our Content Delivery Network, Akamai.
- Communication: Many government agencies have active e-mail programs that they use to communicate with the public about the services they provide. We have a mailing list for the White House, where you can get updates about new content and initiatives. To enable more dynamic emails tailored to users' preferences, we've integrated one of the popular services for government email programs with our CMS in the new module, "GovDelivery."
- Accessibility: We take very seriously our obligation to make sure WhiteHouse.gov is as accessible as possible and are committed to meeting the government accessibility standard, Section 508. As part of that compliance, we want to make sure all images on our site have the appropriate metadata to make them readable on by screen reading software. To help us meet this, while making it easier to manage the rich photos and video content you see on our site, we've developed "Node Embed."
Cole was also a speaker at yesterday's DrupalCon convention in San Francisco, where he spoke about "Open Source in Government."
http://arstechnica.com/open-source/n...-developer.ars
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