A new year and a big win for WordPress!
Well, maybe that’s not totally accurate. Whithouse.gov initially launched their new-year new-look in December but it still feels like 2018’s first win for the WordPress community coming out of 2017. Current Administration and our thoughts on them aside, this should be a huge milestone for WordPress. Think of all of our responses to these questions now:
– Is WordPress secure?
– Is WordPress as secure as Drupal?
– Is WordPress really an enterprise or Government-level CMS?
…and so on and so on.
In this article we’re going to, from a high level, discuss what this means for WordPress’ reputation and what people are saying about Whitehouse.gov from a WordPress standpoint and from a layman’s standpoint.
WordPress has long been the victim of unfair comparisons to custom built systems and other CMS’ when it comes to security and enterprise pliability. Whitehouse.gov moving from Drupal to WordPress should allay some of those fears. Though whitehouse.gov is a website focused on transferring information between the Presidential Administration and citizens, as opposed to being a safe-harbour for sensitive information, it nonetheless needs to check all of the boxes that a Government would expect from any and all technical tools. Some of those checkboxes are likely to include:
– Physical and environmental security
– Access control
– Ability to be internally hosted,
– Security compliance with national standards,
– And much, much more
Needless to say, WordPress’ reputation in Government and Enterprise globally should get a major boost from the whitehouse.gov move to our favourite CMS (hard to believe we still need to discuss this after 26%+ of websites are run on WordPress, but anyways). The move to WordPress is also expected to save U.S. taxpayers over $3,000,000 USD annually.
Unfortunately, overall response to the website from a laypersons’ point of view has been mostly negative. It is a very basic website that operates more strictly like a blog than the previous version of the site. This site also does not employ any types of web forms (besides a poorly designed contact form), sidebars, mega-menus, etc., so maybe basic is an understatement.
Many visitors have also expressed their disappointment in losing access to the popular “Briefings Room” page from the predecessor. The Briefings Room allowed anyone to quickly see a schedule of upcoming videos as well as an archive of past videos, PR’s, announcements etc.
We will continue to track the progress and growth of whitehouse.gov to see if any functionality is added in the future but at a glance, it is unfortunate that the site is so bare-bones and doesn’t contain much of the functionality a site like this, with WordPress as its CMS, could have displayed.
