After the White House, Queen Rania is Using Drupal

Back in October 2009, the tech-savvy US administration decided to switch their website to Drupal, the most famous open source content management system. The step was seen as a triumph for the open source community, and the Obama's administration played this card very well and put the www.whitehouse.gov transition to Drupal as a milestone of its Open-Government initiative.

A (not-so-technical) press release was even published to show the benefits of Drupal in a more human way to the average American. "The programming language is written in public view, available for public use, and able for people to edit. Debugging and upgrading the site's code now... can be done in the matter of days and free to taxpayers." stated the official report.

We have a similar Obama-open-government-style story in Jordan as well.

I was very happy to visit the blog of Dries Buytaert - he is the 'inventor' of Drupal - where he wrote about Queen Rania's website made with Drupal. Even if Dries seems to be fond of very single Drupal website, he put extra emphasis on this 'royal Drupal goodness' and was happy to highlight that 'Queen Rania is well-known for talking about using social media to help change the world'.

This is not the first time that a Jordanian public institution chooses Drupal. One of the best designed Jordanian websites I've ever seen is the one of the Centennial Celebrations of Amman, that also looks extraordinarily good in Arabic. Developed by the great guys at Spring and designed by the well-known design firm Syntax.

Need others? Drupal was used in the development of the websites of the Royal Film Commission, Aqaba Special Economic Zone Authority, Ministry of Political Development and the Housing and Urban Development Corporation.

The only thing we need now is an official press release -as Obama's- that explains to Jordanians why these sites are better, the US administration which believes in software freedom advertised Drupal as a part of their Open Government, something that I doubt Jordanian institutions or even the local Drupal development companies will do.