Drupal, the open source content management system, has been chosen to host the whitehouse website. Tim O’Reilly in his article on the Government switch says the whitehouse liked the flexibilty of Drupal and it’s huge range of features and add-ins. It’s a big vote of confidence for open source software in general and Drupal in particular. But if you don’t know much about it, a Drupal tutorial would be good. Well, just watch the drupal overview video.
The drupal dude has posted a 9 minute video with a simple tour of what this software platform can do. It’s similar to wordpress, which is perhaps more widely known, but can do a lot more. The video takes you through building a website in just a few minutes starting with setting a username and password for one user.
You are then shown how to create a homepage, about page and an article page. The administrator options can add a contact form for your website visitors to fill-in and submit. You have a configurable menu system and can change the theme in an instant. There are lots of themes available from simple, user configurable designs to fully functional website templates from the drupal themes guide.
Drupal dude shows you a few example Drupal websites. A travel site integrates google maps with a photo gallery and user reviews. A mortguage website show a different theme and integrates a mortguage calculator tool. And the last example is an estimating site for builders and their customers. Each builder can have his own website with estimate request form. Websites within a website. Drupal does this by allowing sub-themes and quite sophisticated user permissions. It’s an excellent choice for a community or subscription website.
This tutorial only scratches the surface of what’s possible with this clever software.
