November 4, 2009 by vito
White House http://www.whitehouse.gov/ site was moved to Drupal (they had their own content management system previously). As Michele Heffner writes at http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/Collaboration-Achieving-Better-Results-by..., this is done according to the new Open Government program, increasing society democratization and supporting the middle class. Also, as considered here http://techpresident.com/blog-entry/whitehousegov-goes-drupal, it will simplify content management and will force other government resources to upgrade.
I've looked through the site, looks good in general, Dries and the guys from the Acqua and GDIT did good work, however nothing supernatural here, they did implemented the specifications, you can still notice minor issues here and there.
So what we have on site:
Pros:
+ Bright, attractive layout without any extras;
+ CSS and JS compression turned on, loads quickly;
+ Fits in 1024x768;
+ Handy top menu, navigation is easy;
+ Good security, /user, /update.php, /cron.php etc restricted to see from untrusted IPs.
Cons:
- Site is not valid, HTML Tidy shows 983 errors / 5 warnings, DOCTYPE is not Strict;
- Validation of the forms is a bit strange sometimes, http://www.whitehouse.gov/smc/submit-your-ideas-and-comments after validation breaks and jumps to the right at validation;
- No first and last links at pager;
- Form fields like these at http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact are too small.
- etc., I'll add some of these to the list when I'll have some time :)
I wrote a letter for support team, however I'm not expecting they will pay attention - letters, apparently, come in tens of thousands.
Although the whole site pleases, overall trend is hopeful, Drupal is growing :)
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Certainly, WhiteHouse support team didn't paid any attention
Certainly, they didn't paid any attention.
Ok, here is extended bugs list:
1. Taxonomy lists like http://www.whitehouse.gov/taxonomy/term/1 , http://www.whitehouse.gov/taxonomy/term/2 , http://www.whitehouse.gov/taxonomy/term/3 , http://www.whitehouse.gov/taxonomy/term/4 still look untidy - left sidebar is empty and bg is broken, it is seen how background picture is repeating.
2. Seems there is no taxonomy terms bigger then 4, http://www.whitehouse.gov/taxonomy/term/5 , http://www.whitehouse.gov/taxonomy/term/6 , http://www.whitehouse.gov/taxonomy/term/7 , ... http://www.whitehouse.gov/taxonomy/term/99 . Come on, did they developers and moderators forgot how to use tags?
3. Site is not valid, HTML Tidy shows 983 errors / 5 warnings, DOCTYPE is not Strict. It's not only me who sees this ;) http://personaldemocracy.com/blog-entry/whitehousegov-goes-drupal-update...
4. Validation of the forms is a bit strange sometimes, http://www.whitehouse.gov/smc/submit-your-ideas-and-comments after validation breaks and jumps to the right at validation.
5. No first and last links at pager.
6. Form fields like these at http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact are too small.
7. Here is the http://www.whitehouse.gov/robots.txt there:
User-agent: *
Crawl-delay: 10
Here is what bots think about that :
Line 2: Crawl-delay: 10 Rule ignored by Googlebot
I'll extend the list a bit when I'll have some time. Was there a bit of truth in the comments at the http://personaldemocracy.com/node/15131 ? ;)