I recently wrote about how open source content management system (CMS) platforms like Drupal have gained a foothold in the government sector. However, the majority of enterprise-level CMS implementations at the Federal Government level are run by the big boys, including longtime market leaders Vignette (now part of Open Text) and Autonomy Interwoven. Other large providers with a significant number of federal clients include Broadvision, Percussion Rhythmyx, Stellent (now part of Oracle), and EMC Documentum.
It has been a long, gradual process for federal organizations to tackle agency-wide CMS initiatives. But we’re seeing some recent momentum. Both the Center’s for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) – two huge agencies – are in the process of rolling out improved CMS solutions.
Drupal is arguably the most well known and widely used open source content management system (CMS). It’s a very robust platform that allows its active, devoted developer community to customize and extend the CMS to do great things.
An unlikely adopter of Drupal over the past couple of years has been the U.S. Federal Government. And it now seems like a very timely move given Obama’s Open Government Initiative. The Drupal community rejoiced with the February 2009 announcement that the new Recovery.gov was running on Drupal. This was arguably the most high profile site (certainly in the Federal Government space) to launch on Drupal. However, the site later migrated to MS Sharepoint.
There’s debate on the reason behind the switch from Drupal to Sharepoint. Some say that Sharepoint is simply the platform of preference for the company that took over the contract, Maryland-based Smartronix Inc., and that they lacked in Drupal expertise. Others say that Drupal ended up being limited in its ability to manage the necessary workflow for the financial data that the site displays.
My guess is that it was more of a case of the new contractor needing to deliver a proposal that differentiated itself from the incumbent contractor. One good approach to doing that is to propose a new platform, and then explain your reasoning for why it’s a better option than the existing technology. The argument was made that going with MS Sharepoint offered a lot of benefit in how quickly the site could be built (apparently they only had 11 weeks). This is certainly a valid argument over building your own content CMS, but we know Drupal can also be deployed very quickly. Here’s an interesting article on the site’s switch to Sharepoint.
Drupal fans didn’t have to wait long for another, and even more prominent, success story. The new Whitehouse.gov was launched on Drupal around the same time that Recovery.gov dropped the open source platform.
NySenate.gov (not Federal but a nice site worth noting)
Recovery.gov (now using Sharepoint)
The Department of Commerce and National Institutes of Health have also used Drupal, and NASA has also been reported to have used Drupal for some for internal sites.
Drupal Resources
Find out if a site is running Drupal
You might be interested in knowing if a particular site is built using Drupal. You may be able to tell be checking out the source code, or you can try this site – http://isthissitebuiltwithdrupal.com – which lets you enter a URL and it will run an instant check for you.
InformationWeek’s annual U.S. IT Salary Survey showed a median raise for IT professionals of 0% in 2010. The survey data was gathered from 20,000+ IT professionals between November and January. It’s the first time in 11 years that IT salaries have not increased. The pay freeze holds true pretty much across the board – managers, staffers, contractors, and consultants.
Median Base IT Salaries
Managers: Base $103,000, Total $111,000
Staffers: Base $81,000, Total $85,000
Interesting Survey Statistics
Highest paying market segment: Financial services (Securities & Investments). Managers earned a median total compensation of $156,000. Runner Up – Biotech ($142,000)
Lowest paying market segments: Local and state government, non-profit, education
Highest Paying Titles (total compensation)
$120,000 – Architect
$110,000 – Systems Engineer
$105,000 – Project Leader
$99,000 – Software Engineer
$94,000 – Systems Programmer
$91,000 – Database Administrator
$91,000 – Software Developer
To me there’s not a great distinction between some of those titles listed. Systems engineer, software engineer, systems programmer, and software developer are all pretty similar roles in my mind. The report didn’t contain much information on the geographic differences in salaries and 2010 raises. Obviously some parts oft he country are doing better than others. I believe the average raise in the Washington D.C. area for IT professionals was somewhere around 3%. Not great but certainly better than the average.
Here are the most popular NFL team websites – ranked from 1st to 32nd. It’s not much of a surprise that “America’s Team” tops the list and ranked #1 in traffic for all three statistics providers. The Titans came in last. Maybe Titans fans were so disappointed with the 2009 letdown – after a great 2008 season – that they just couldn’t bear to watch (or browse). I also thought it would be interesting to include the total dollar value rank for each team.
Popularity *
Team Website
Alexa Traffic Rank
Quantcast Rank
Compete.com Unique Visits
Team $ value rank **
1
Dallas Cowboys
1
1
1
1
2
Indianapolis Colts
4
4
3
15
3
Philadelphia Eagles
2
7
5
7
4
Minnesota Vikings
12
2
4
31
5
New Orleans Saints
7
3
9
22
6
San Diego Chargers
5
5
10
24
7
Green Bay Packers
11
8
2
17
8
Pittsburgh Steelers
6
9
7
16
9
Chicago Bears
3
10
12
9
10
New England Patriots
13
6
8
3
11
New York Jets
10
12
6
5
12
Washington Redskins
9
11
14
2
13
Cincinnati Bengals
8
14
15
21
14
Baltimore Ravens
16
15
11
11
15
New York Giants
15
22
13
4
16
Buffalo Bills
14
18
18
26
17
Denver Broncos
19
17
17
10
18
Cleveland Browns
24
16
20
13
19
Oakland Raiders
26
13
21
32
20
Miami Dolphins
22
20
19
18
21
Arizona Cardinals
23
23
16
23
22
Seattle Seahawks
25
19
23
20
23
Tampa Bay Buccaneers
18
28
24
8
24
Houston Texans
28
21
22
6
25
San Francisco 49ers
17
25
32
27
26
Jacksonville Jaguars
20
32
27
29
27
Carolina Panthers
27
27
26
12
28
Atlanta Falcons
21
31
28
30
29
Kansas City Chiefs
31
29
25
14
30
Detroit Lions
30
26
30
28
31
St Louis Rams
32
24
31
25
32
Tennessee Titans
29
30
29
19
* These rankings are based on traffic rankings provided by Alexa and Quantcast, and unique visitors provided by Compete. The numbers generally reflect the 2nd half of the 2009-2010 NFL season. As I’ve talked about here, Alexa and other traffic ranking providers can be pretty inaccurate. But I needed some metrics to work with – otherwise the Ravens would be at the top of the list and the Steelers would be at the very bottom!
About a year my company was tasked with customizing a Ning installation for a large client. In addition to the standard design and CSS tweaks, our developers also took on the challenge of building a custom front-end interface to validate new members against an external database, and then pass them to Ning’s registration if they were validated. It was a nice solution. During this project I was introduced to Firebug – a free plugin for Firefox that eases the pain of inspecting websites code when you don’t actually have access to the source code. There are plenty of other ways to go about this, but Firebug is the quickest and easiest that I’ve found. The expandable panel allows you to clearly see the associated HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for each page element you hover over. This tool is a real time saver when you’re trying to decipher extremely complicated nested CSS – like Ning uses.
In this example I’ve got the Firebug panel at the bottom of Firefox expanded. As I hover over a button the HTML code is shown on the left side and the corresponding CSS code is shown on the right side of the panel. When Ning’s CSS has 5-10 styles influencing a single page element, this plugin makes life a lot easier than trying to dig through a bunch of separate style sheets to determine the CSS inheritance.
Open Source for Open Government
InformationWeek’s annual U.S. IT Salary Survey showed a median raise for IT professionals of 0% in 2010. The survey data was gathered from 20,000+ IT professionals between November and January. It’s the first time in 11 years that IT salaries have not increased. The pay freeze holds true pretty much across the board – managers, staffers, contractors, and consultants.
