White House Site Switches to Drupal

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The Associated Press this weekend that the official White House website has been switched to using the open-source Drupal content management system

Using open source will result in improved security -- because more programmers will be looking for errors in the software -- as well as more quickly and less expensively updated, the AP said.

The White House site had been using technology held over from the administration of former President George W. Bush, but the staff had been working toward the transition since the inauguration. For example, the , launched in February, was already built using Drupal.

Several other federal agencies, such as the Department of Defense, the Department of Commerce, the Department of Education, and the General Service Administration, are also said to be using Drupal.

However, modifications made by the White House staff, such as to improve security, have not thus far been given back to the Drupal community, noted Tim O'Reilly in his blog. "The source code for Drupal (and the rest of the LAMP stack) is indeed available, but the modifications that were made to meet government security, scalability, and hosting requirements have not yet been shared," he said.

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As raised by , a high-profile move to an open-source CMS prompts a lot of operational questions beyond the headline. Below is a compact, practical playbook for teams who must keep uptime, security, and legal compliance intact after a migration.

  • Start with a baseline: full code and dependency audit, threat model for public and admin surfaces, and an inventory of contributed modules/extensions.
  • Minimize attack surface: remove unused modules, disable PHP execution in upload directories, enforce strict file permissions, and pin library versions.
  • Authentication and access control: require strong passwords and two‑factor for all admin accounts, use least-privilege roles, and enable immutable audit logging for privileged actions.
  • Transport, headers, and cookies: HTTPS everywhere, HSTS, secure cookie flags, and a strict Content Security Policy to reduce XSS risk.
  • Infrastructure and scaling: put a CDN and reverse‑proxy cache in front of origin, use opcode caching, plan DB read replicas, and have an automated, tested failover and restore process.
  • DevOps and lifecycle: keep all code in version control, run CI with unit/integration/security scans, stage every change, and automate emergency patch rollout.
  • Monitoring and incident response: centralize logs, alert on unusual admin activity or traffic spikes, and keep legally required retention for records/audit trails.
  • Governance and transparency: maintain an internal policy for what gets open‑sourced (sanitize sensitive code/config before upstreaming) and a schedule for third‑party patching and upgrades.
  • Accessibility and privacy: validate against applicable accessibility standards and minimize collection of personal data.

Common post-migration triage: 500/blank pages -> check PHP/FPM logs and disable recent contrib modules; slow pages -> profile DB queries and enable full-page/edge caching; auth failures -> check cookie domains and session store. Keep a tested rollback path and document the security/contribution decisions so future teams can reproduce them.

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