Shortly after Donald Trump’s first year as President of the United States, the White House website has changed its content management system.
After over eight years using Drupal as its CMS, the current Government has decided to move Whitehouse.gov to WordPress, rolling back the Obama Administration measure of October 2009.
This decision is almost as revolutionary as it was when Drupal, one of the website development platforms classified as free software, was chosen and which was interpreted as a gesture towards diversity by Barack Obama’s Government. However, this system has lost fallen in popularity over time, leading the White House to move its website architecture to WordPress.
Although no official communication has been issued, the US administration website source code has the ‘wp’ prefix which has been used by WordPress for its files and folders since 15 December. It is not surprising that one possible explanation for this change is the financial saving offered by WordPress, as its maintenance costs are lower than those of Drupal.
Victor Senovilla, Development Manager at HADOQ, explains that “WordPress is the most widely used CMS (content manager) in the world and it has the largest community for maintenance. This makes it cheaper to maintain, easier to use and it offers more possibilities in a simple way”.
“Both WordPress and Drupal (the former whitehouse.gov system) have suffered many security breaches over the years, but WordPress has undoubtedly won the battle over Drupal in terms of security”, adds Senovilla.
