Downloader: The White House releases its open source code

Friday, April 30, 2010

The White House releases its open source code

If you've visited WhiteHouse.gov since its change of ownership back in 2009 you'll hopefully have noticed some very cool changes. The site itself was jazzed up -- CHANGE! -- and, as best befits this 'information age', accessibility has been greatly improved for all citizens and denizens of the USA. What you may not have noticed, however, is that the entire site runs on a customized version of Drupal, the open source content management system.

Today, the White House has released four of the modules it has developed back into the open source community. The first two are to improve scalability: Context HTTP Headers improves server efficiency, while Akamai as the name suggests integrates Drupal with Akamai's global cache network. Next, and probably of less use, is GovDelivery, which replaces Drupal's SMTP back-end and integrates with the internal governmental email system. The last module (and the most useful for the world at large) is Node Embed. As the name suggests, it lets you nest Drupal nodes inside other nodes -- Slideshows within Articles, an Author bio embedded within a blog post, and so on.

The wording would suggest that they are keen to share more of their code in due course. They are probably just making sure it's all commented and documented first.

Share Share