This is where the Trump team can prove their ability to lead. Right now, the website has a lot of empty pages. Even the “Email” link is broken. By watching the website develop, you can see what Trump prioritizes. Clearly, Trump loves his family. While a lot of key content is missing, First Lady Melania has a nice page…
Karen Pence has one too…
But overall, the site still has the same framework as before…
If Trump is going to be in the Whitehouse for 4-8 years, Drupal 7 might not last that long. Drupal 8 officially launched in November 2015 – mere months after Trump announced his presidential campaign. Both technology and politics moves fast. At some point, Drupal 7 will only have support for security fixes – then no support at all.
There’s no need to panic right now, as rough forecasts put End-of-Life for Drupal 7 at 2020. Drupal 7 is not a problem for Trump right now, but it might be if he wins reelection. Will the Trump team be that forward thinking? The Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 upgrade is not a simple task. Again, Drupal can be challenging depending on how the previous administration set it up.
Drupal is open source software. The community liked to brag about powering the whitehouse.gov website. Will this sentiment continue? Will Trump choose an alternative? A quick search of “Drupalgeddon” would be an argument against Drupal. But powerful features like Drupal Views, improvements in Accessibility for people with disabilities (508 compliance), in-line editing (with an included WYSIWYG editor) and enhanced mobile support are strong arguments for a Drupal 8 upgrade.
Behind all the Red vs. Blue rhetoric, this is what matters. One of the appeals in having Trump as president is that he’s a builder. His campaign slogan was “Make America Great Again” …even better than it ever was before. Clearly, there’s an opportunity to do this with Whitehouse.gov. There’s no political confrontation necessary here… no battle in Congress to fight… no counting votes in the Senate… no Supreme Court decision. The Trump administration can simply get it done.
UPDATE – Well, it looks like the White House solved their Drupal 8 problem, they switched to WordPress. 😆