Today, the White House announced that they were releasing their first set of Drupal modules to the Open Source community. Here is an extract from their announcement:
As part of our ongoing effort to develop an open platform for WhiteHouse.gov, we’re releasing some of the custom code we’ve developed. This code is available for anyone to review, use, or modify. We’re excited to see how developers across the world put our work to good use in their own applications.
By releasing some of our code, we get the benefit of more people reviewing and improving it. In fact, the majority of the code for WhiteHouse.gov is already open source as part of the Drupal project.
This is a great turn of events. They released 4 modules in total:
- Context HTTP Headers – for site scaling by telling cache servers how long to hold onto data and when to serve fresh content
- Akamai – integrates with the Akamai CDN
- GovDelivery – sending dynamic emails tailored to users’ preferences
- Node Embed – make sure all images on our site have the appropriate metadata to make them readable on by screen reading software.
This is a great effort and I look forward to more from the White House team as well as other governments doing similar things.
David Peterson
