The Federal Government to Migrate Its Public-Facing Websites to Drupal

In a move where about one third of the government’s 1,200 odd-sites planning to migrate off commercial and other alternatives onto the open source platform- The Federal Government has revealed long-range plans to migrate its public-facing websites to Drupal on a software as a service (cloud computing) basis.

What’s This Drupal CMS?

Written in PHP, Drupal is an open source content management framework that is distributed under the GNU General Public Licence. Similar to WordPress and Joomla, it is essentially a front end with a user-friendly administration graphical user interface. Astonishingly, 24% of all .gov websites are using it for their websites. 

Here are some of the significant cabinet, commerce, and congressional agency websites built on Drupal:

White House:

·         the inaugural Drupal site in the .gov movement (2009)

·         Code was released for the grassroots citizen engagement 'We the People'(2012)

·         Developers boast a full list of government contributions to the open-source community

Similarly,

U.S. Department of Education: ED.gov runs the gamut for all things academic-related, from preschool to PhD preparation. Currently running on Unix, Apache, mod_ssl and OpenSSL.

·         leverages Drupal's flexibility and Web 2.0 capabilities

·         On an average gets 30 million hits per month

·         Mini websites within ED.gov power blogs, forums, galleries, RSS feeds by taxonomy, and other custom content types

Besides, The United States are affiliate websites NASA, the Department of Defence, and the U.S. Military.

Drupal and The Use Of Public Cloud.

When questioned on the choice of Drupal as the most preferred web CMS platform, US govt comes with two major prerequisites fulfilled by this solid framework: An Open Source Solution and the Use of the Public Cloud.  In other words, it is an excellent idea to leverage public-facing websites onto cloud computing infrastructure from website development companies. If you want to get a cloud web hosting platform migration done this same approach applies here and other IT verticals within the Federal Government.