Whitehouse.gov Moves to Drupal
The Personal Democracy Forums has reported that Whitehouse.gov is moving from its proprietary content management system to the open source Drupal platform. The article states that the Obama's new media team chose Drupal over the Bush era CMS for its flexible development environment, stability and dynamic features. According to tech revolutionary Tim O'Reilly the white house Drupal implementation will be "running on a Red Hat Linux system with Apache, MySQL and the rest of the LAMP stack. Apache Solr is the new White House search engine."
While Drupal is not new to the government (such sites as the US Department of Defense, Commerce, Education and the General Service Administration currently use Drupal) it is a big win for open source and Drupal in particular. This form of high profile validation helps solidify confidence that open source projects can readily compete with their closed sourced brethren.
The site was done in joint development with Acquia, General Dynamics Information Technology, Phase2 Technology, Akamai, and the Terremark Federal Group.
Further Reading:
- WhiteHouse.gov Goes Drupal (Personaldemocracy.com)
- Whitehouse.gov using Drupal (Buytaert.net)
- Thoughts on the Whitehouse.gov switch to Drupal (Radar.oreilly.com)
- Tim O'Reilly's Three Insights into the Drupaling of the White House (Techpresident.com)
HTML 5 Preview
Google Developer Brad Neuberg talks about some of the exciting new features in HTML5. Topic include some of amazing features that designers will be salavating over, SVG/Canvas rendering as well as many others. I only wish they would move to finalize the spec faster.
Object Oriented CSS video
I remember seeing this video on the web a while back and really relating to the concepts Nicole Sullivan was presenting. In my own work I have been trying to achieve a more modular, reusable, streamlined CSS code library which this video helped me to better conceptualize.
Providing a consistent name-space and chaining selectors of elemental "objects" into what she refers to as modules is a great idea. This methods of structuring your CSS does needs more preplanning done up front, but that is a good thing and the overall time saving is well worth the effort.
Upgrade Complete
I had the time today to finally get the site updated with all the latest security patches and update a few out of dates modules. It was a surprisingly painless experience this time around. After having my last Drupal sites database crash and burn I'm now thinking the reason might be that my hosting company upgraded the version of MySQL on my server. Not sure, but a shot in the dark. Regardless I now have all nice green check marks in my status reports and I feel happy again.
Now it's finally time to get going on the custom site theme and start with the content. I have been delaying developing the new theme beyond the comp stage until I finished up the book "Front End Drupal: Designing, Theming, Scripting" in the hope of picking up some new trick. So far it seems it's mostly stuff I am already comfortable with. That said, I still haven't read up to the part about jQuery.
One other decision I made is to use this blog to experiment a little with some of the new CSS3 goodies that most of the newer A-grade browsers now support. I have also been tempted to try my hand at CSS3 Table Styles, but that may be pushing things too far at this point.
Side note and personal reminder: After trying to back up my site on a fresh install of wampserver to my production machine I keep getting an the error "Function ereg() is deprecated in D:\WAMP\v2.x\www\drupal\includes\file.inc on line 902". After much hair pulling I found this post that explained all that needed to be done to get the site up and running was to temperary disable PHP error reporting. I restarted the server and the site installed just fine. After I checked that everything was working I turned error reporting back on and now I am happily on my way to happier more productive Drupal life.
Google Chrome Frame
I just love this idea!! Nice to see Google putting the fire under Microsoft's feet to get IE in line with modern browsers one way or another. I don't see this as an end to IE6 but a fantastic shot across the bow of Microsoft.
New Site in the Works
After a few months offline and a lot of unexpected live changes I have finally started to get the first skeleton of a new site up. So much has changed in the last few months that it would take me just as long to try and make some sort of sense out of it all. Instead of wasting anymore precious time trying to wrap my brain around the peculiar twists of fate life sometimes bring our way, it's time to once again get engaged in the things and activities that I love. This blog will change formats slightly. In the past it has been a showcase of some of my illustrations and artwork. This format will continue on to an extent but will put more focus on the design and front-end development of websites and in particular Drupal sites. In addition I am retiring my old work and starting a "semi-regular" comic that will use technology and geek life as its backdrop. If all goes as planned there should be a nice synergy between the comics and blog posts. The current state of this site its still very rough. As always I'm using Drupal for the CMS and as of the time of this writing using the Aquia Marina theme until my new custom theme is ready to go. I have also set up a temporary contact form, so please feel free to contact me with feedback you might have.
