lilianev

This week WhiteHouse.gov moved to a Drupal Content Management System. An article in NYT states that it was a “serious seal of approval for open-source software” and that that’s no lie. While Drupal was already a popular CMS, there’s nothing like an endorsement via the White House’s use of the CMS.

To be frank, I’m quite surprised about the move to Drupal. From my personal experience, not a lot of people are satisfied with the functionality of Drupal. A while back I was interviewing with an academic department at University of Wisconsin – Madison and one of their main requests for the job applicants was to undo the Drupal website that was driving faculty and staff crazy. Their Drupal website was not giving them the web presence & back-end functionality that they needed, and no one knew how to customize properly so functionality was breaking down all over the place.

I’ve installed Drupal on a testing website of mine and it’s easy enough to navigate, but true customization was not at my fingertips. The same article mentioned before also noted that  she could sett up a “basic Web site easily enough, [but] doing any kind of real customization work proved a bit tricky.” While WordPress is blogging software, in my opinion, many times it’s easier to customize WordPress code to run a website than actually deal with a CMS. I know the benefits of CMS, but I truly haven’t found one that I adore or would actually recommend to someone. I’m more inclined to recommend WordPress plus tweaking to run a site than actually recommend Drupal, Joomla, or RedDot. I’ve seen a new CMS called Mambo and I’ve yet to try it out, but we’ll see how that one compares to the rest.

Besides all the Drupal bashing that I’ve just done, the Drupal White House website does look very, very nice.