It has now relaunched using open source Drupal. Also interesting is that it’s no longer broadcasting any headers regarding it’s server. Considering Drupal is by far better tested on a Unix OS andApache, I’m wondering if they dropped Windows Server/IIS 6.0 in favor of some sort of Linux and Apache. I can’t find any hint at what they are using.

It’s noteworthy that Drupal was already used on recovery.gov and has been used in politics by way of CivicSpace for the Dean campaign in 2004.

Via Drupal it’s still using jQuery (verison 1.2.6). It’s also now using RSS rather than ATOM for feeds, which I presume is by way of the switch to Drupal rather than an intentional effort.

Another interesting change is they tweaked the doctype from XHTML Transitional to XHTML+RDFa.

Pretty much everything else is still the same including the design. Analytics is still done using WebTrends (holdover from the Bush administration) and Akamai still sits in front of their servers.

For CSS hackers: They still choose conditional CSS for IE compatibility.

Their pages don’t fully validate anymore, though there is no terrible markup either.

Video is still done using Flash, maybe they’ll consider adopting HTML5 video. They could do so and fallback to Flash. The latest versions of Firefox, Safari, and Chrome could take advantage of it today. The rest of the browsers would get the Flash experience. That would be the next major step in opening up. Mark Pilgrim has a good primer if they need.

Edit [9/26/2009 @ 1:45 PM EST]: Tim O’Reilly confirms it is indeed running on LAMP, specifically Red Hat Linux with Apache, MySQL and obviously PHP. Apache Solr is used for search.

• Running Microsoft-IIS 6.0 and ASP.NET 2.0.50727. The Bush administration ran Apache on what I think was some sort of Unix. Data is gzip’d.
• Whitehouse.gov is using Akamai as a CDN and for DNS service.
• Using jQuery 1.2.6 (someone should let them know 1.3 is out). Also using several plugins including jQuery UI, jcarousel, Thickbox. Also using swfobject.
• Pages tentatively validate as XHTML 1.0 Transitional! I’m shocked by this. I’ve checked several pages all with the same result.
• Using WebTrends for analytics. Bush Administration also did.
• IE Conditional Stylesheets and a print stylesheet.
• RSS feeds are actually Atom feeds.
• The website is setting two cookies that I can see WT_FPC and ASP.NET_SessionId which expire at the end of the session which is not prohibited in federal government as per OMB Guidance for Implementing the Privacy Provisions of the E-Government Act of 2002 (using Google Cache for that link since I can’t find it anywhere else, our government should really keep those in a more permanent location).

I should note that this is quite different in architecture than the Obama campaign site which ran PWS/PHP, no notable JS library, feed, and Google Analytics.

Update [1/20/2009 @ 9:00 PM EST]:

• Jason Kottke points out that the new whitehouse.gov sports a much slimmer robots.txt file.
• Content is now under Creative Commons license. Way to go Lawrence Lessig.