Whitehouse Drupal Website Stirs Intense Discussion & Misses the Point

While most of us have been involved in Important Stuff like our Thanksgiving menu or the disastrous UMich football season (sniff, sniff), a small cadre of techno geeks have been burning up the bandwidth about a major development in the Real World.  It seems that the Obama administration which is under fire for not resolving every injustice since the birth of Christ in the last nine months, has quietly (I love using this phrase “quietly”) launched their new website using the Drupal web content management system.

Drupal is software that helps website administrators manage content on their website. It’s also free. But Drupal is also a movement. It’s got an icon: Eyes of infinity in a drop.  And a song, which our own Doug Vann performs.  I’m sure somewhere there is a flag.  So it is not surprising that the already partisan Whitehouse is going to also attract a partisan crowd of Drupal supporters and detractors. Or,as I like to think of it, just another religious war.

There are few things uglier than a technology argument among the technorati.  Sarcasm and put downs abound.  I’ve been monitoring this matter on Slashdot.com (“News for nerds. Stuff that matters”).  The biggest concern is that the whitehouse.gov site is going to be cracked or “exploited” for some sinister purpose. The sincere concern suggests that whitehouse.gov is a tunnel into our national security and not just a place where you can see First Mom, Michelle Obama, working the hula hoop.  Or as yelvington (8169) observed, “If your security beliefs are based on Googling ” exploit” I hope you’re not in charge of anything important.” Oof, I’m so injured.

Anyway, while all this noise is happening a really important point is being missed. When you visit whitehouse.gov, your pages are actually being served to you through something called a Content Distribution Network. In this case, this is Akamai. Moreover, the old whitehouse.gov website was also being served to you by Akamai. Nothing has changed.

Now this little fact seems to escape everyone’s notice. The closest that anyone has come is this comment from Kifoth (980005), “You’re assuming that the site’s pages aren’t served via a third party ‘dumb’ caching server, with the actual Drupal server locked down and disconnected from the internet.”

Bingo! Kifoth (980005) seems to have nailed the matter. While Drupal is the content management system, another layer, the content distribution network exists between the site and its visitor. I think this is cool. But I’ve heard from some quarters that claiming that whitehouse.gov is a Drupal website is “disingenuous.”

I don’t agree. At the core, the Drupal CMS permits rapid deployment and re-use of content to serve a rapidly changing environment. This is something Drupal does exceptionally well. If, in fact, it needs a little help from friends to push that content to a global community, it takes nothing away from what Drupal does well. It just proves that, even on the Internet, sometimes it takes a village.