FCC website goes open source with Drupal

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By Alice Lipowicz

By Alice Lipowicz

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The Federal Communications Commission is transitioning FCC.gov to the Drupal open-source content management system.

A handful of federal agencies have shifted their websites to Drupal or are in the process of doing so, including the White House, the Commerce and Energy departments and Recovery.gov. Developers describe Drupal as a flexible and inexpensive alternative compatible with Web 2.0 applications. Open-source systems are made from code that is publicly available for free rather than proprietary code.

The Federal Communications Commission is the latest federal agency to announce plans to convert its main website to the Drupal open-source content management platform, officials said.

“This decision is a significant step towards modernizing our own underlying online infrastructure -- a key stage in redesigning and rebuilding FCC.gov,” Steven VanRoekel, the FCC's managing director, wrote on the FCC's blog on Sept. 22.

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The FCC is looking to volunteers to help develop open-source applications for the commission's data.

“As an open-source content management system, Drupal also enjoys a robust and active community of users, code contributors, and evangelists. We look forward to engaging with this community to help us innovate and learn, as we build out our own budding community of citizen developers,” VanRoekel wrote.

VanRoekel recently announced that FCC.gov would be adding several new interactive applications, with greater capabilities for searching and displaying the commission's data and records.

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