White House Website Moves to Drupal

The official website of the White House is now running on Drupal, an open-source content management system (CMS). Stage 2 Studios chose Drupal as it's CMS of choice several years ago and now has significant experience with the platform.

Content management systems make creating and editing website content easy for website owners. Nearly every site we build runs some form of CMS. With a CMS in place, our clients simply log in with a username and password and then click an edit button on the pages they want to modify. Editing the text and photos on the page is then no more tricky than editing an email message. And creating a new page is as simple as clicking a link, typing the desired content into a form and clicking a submit button. Changes are instantly visible on the website without the need to call a webmaster or hire an HTML wizard.

Drupal is a particularly powerful CMS platform. As website developers, we like Drupal for the deep level of control it gives us when building a website. Some CMSs limit how much you can edit the layout and functionality of your site. Drupal has thousands of modules that offer nearly limitless ways to extend the functionality of a website. And features not offered by an existing module can be custom-coded by our developers.

A CMS like Drupal allows editing of more than just typical web pages. We've deployed CMSs to manage online stores, classified ad subscriptions, interactive content, photo galleries, business directories and more. If you can imagine the content, we can provide a CMS solution to make it easy for you to edit and organize.

While the White House website is obviously the highest profile government site to run Drupal, it's no surprise Drupal was chosen. The CMS is one of the most popular available today. Last year we launched a new website for the Procurement Technical Assistance Center of Alaska. This government agency is a branch of the Department of Defense and the website we built runs on Drupal.

Newspaper Readership Drops to New Lows

Average daily readership for newspapers plunged 10.6% versus last summer according to the latest reports. Newspapers like the New York Times reached new subscription lows. The Times daily readership dipped below 1 million for the first time in years.

However, it's important to note that we're talking about print readership here. Online news readership is exploding, even for the same newspapers that report such gloomy circulation numbers. The question remains whether print publications like newspapers can maintain the revenue levels they've enjoyed with their print editions.

Early indications suggest online ventures don't bring as much revenue for newspapers as traditional print products. Some efforts to charge for online content do little more than drive online readers elsewhere.

A few papers reported growth in the most recent period. The Wall Street Journal has edged out USA Today as the nation's most popular newspaper, illustrating the point that content rules. Readers are finding limitless free alternatives to national news on the web, but specialty financial news is less readily available. Thus, WSJ can attract a following while the more generic content of USA Today is less competitive.