House.gov moves to Drupal

The open source content management system continues to make inroads into US government IT.

In another win for open source, the United States House of Representatives has chosen Drupal as the web content management system for House.gov. That makes the "People's House" one of the largest government institutions to move to the open source web content management platform.

The move follows a series of high profile moves to Drupal in the federal government, including WhiteHouse.gov and, more recently, Energy.gov.

In a request for sources posted to House.gov, embedded below, the House of Representatives chief administrative officer indicated the institution's interest in assembling a list of vendors to support Drupal development. According to the document, there are some 520 websites at House.gov for Drupal developers to work on.

Drupal creator Dries Buytaert offered insight into how the House of Representatives will use Drupal, including background and examples of recently deployed Drupal sites, on his blog.

[Disclosure: Buytaert is currently the CTO at Acquia, one of the vendors involved in the House's Drupal effort. O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures is an investor in Acquia.]

When the House went looking for a platform to standardize their web presence, they chose Drupal because it met their requirements to:

Accommodate hundreds of independent websites, each with different sets of features.

Provide the ability to deploy new sites quickly and efficiently.

Enable House Members to use the web designer or developer of their choice by leveraging the Drupal community.

As the new House continues to move forward with an e-transition under the GOP, open source and Drupal developers are looking like increasingly important players in the Washington IT ecosystem.

Drupal Sources Sought

in case you didn't know...
you should probably mention O'Reilly has an investment in Acquia (http://oatv.com/investments/) when talking about them on an O'Reilly site

Mac Slocum [13 January 2011 06:49 AM]

You're absolutely right. A clear disclosure has been added.

Alex Howard [13 January 2011 06:58 AM]

As Mac commented, you are correct, "Full." In fact, I did not know, given that there has been a pretty strict wall between editorial (my role) and that side of the house. We expect our readers to hold us to a high standard. We've added the disclosure and appreciate the comment.

Clay Johnson [13 January 2011 09:25 AM]

How much did it cost?

Did they investigate alternatives?

When?