In February, the White House, under Barak Obama’s new progressive leadership developed the Recovery.Gov website to much fanfare in the Open-Source Content Management System (CMS) community. Particularly happy were the developers that use Drupal as their Open-Source CMS was the one chosen to develop the site with.

As Nancy Sola points out in her article “Why the White House’s Embrace of Drupal Matters”:

I asked two CMS expert friends to help me understand the situation, and here are a few of the reasons they gave for why the White House’s embrace of Drupal is momentous:

First off is the very fact that with the move the White House is offering an alternative to DC’s long love-fest with proprietary technology. Drupal is free, and hey, the economy being what it is, there are tax-payer dollars to be saved on going open source.

Second, it shows that the White House isn’t putting much stock in the argument that collaboratively-built software isn’t stable or secure enough for government use. (Though one could make the argument that Recovery.gov isn’t exactly mission critical.)

Third, Drupal is, arguably, progressive. It has relatively deep roots in Democratic politics, first getting attention in the political space as the foundation under Dean Space. Whatever state Drupal is in today is a result of the community of developers who cared enough to nurture it — the underlying message, of which, of course, echoes Obama’s political narrative.

Embracing Open-Source development, which is part of the Web 2.0 world and the more progressive way to build modern websites is a true leap-of-faith from our government. The whole idea of Open-Source means that the government doesn’t have to pay for the basic technology development. That part is done and it is free to use. The customization of the Open-Source tool like Drupal is the part that would still cost money, but the government won’t have to live with custom coded products if they use Open-Source as the platform.

So, is Drupal the big winner in the Open-Source CMS game? Not likely. While today they can bask in the glow of the initial win from the government, there are a lot of Open-Source players that have their own unique method of development. Many argue that the only two players in the Open-Source CMS game are Drupal and Joomla, probably the two currently most popular CMS products.

But a quick look at one of my favorite sites, opensourceCMS.com tells the bigger story.

In the PHP type of Open-Source CMS products there are 193 different Website Development products, 91 Portal products, 19 Forum products, 14 Blog products, 11 Image Gallery products, 10 Learning Management products, 7 eCommerce products, and 5 Wiki products. That’s just as of today. More are in development to compete with these in the future as technology will surely advance.

So while Drupal might be the current flavor of choice, developers and I’m sure the federal government, will be keeping an eye on the future of Open-Source CMS. One thing might be certain though. The static HTML website of the past will be heading for extinction, which means that many of today’s static websites will need to be converted to something that incorporates Web 2.0. technologies and development and Open-Source technology with it’s nice price-tag (free) may just be the choice.