Bashing a particular software is all well and good. But you fail to mention any comparable alternatives - even a for-profit alternative. As a humble amateur looking to create web content of my own and attempting to manage it in an organized fashion, I would be interested in learning of something other than an $18 million dollar overhaul from a private contractor.

In the meantime, Drupal is one of the only 'name brands' of which I've heard.

How about the proprietary "Bush Administration" system - i.e., one developed at taxpayer expense and owned by the people?

How exactly would it be "owned by the people" and "proprietary"?

I had the same question. I've looked at Plone, and though I managed to get it installed, it was intimidating, and felt clunky. A friend of mine (who works with it) complained about the need to consult The Plone Book before doing anything.

For work, for software development (which is NOT content management) we settled on Trac (edgewall.com), and I like it a bunch. Accessible, lightweight, useful plugins -- and we wrote some of our own, including one that runs a bunch of elisp macros in emacs-batch, feeds that to TeX, renders DVI to png, caches it, and displays it.

And when I did an upgrade and port, from a box running one version of Solaris, Python, Trac, etc, to a different box running newer versions of Solaris, Python, Trac, it took all of an hour. I run it on my laptop (use MacPorts to install) and use rsync to suck it over for backup/testing (we use sqlite for the database, yes, a hair sleazy).

Because it was "proprietary" to the White House. Did you READ the article?

hyperionred:

Because it was "proprietary" to the White House. Did you READ the article?

Proprietary means privately owned and controlled. Something "owned by the people" is not proprietary. Just because the software was not distributed to the public does not mean that it is proprietary. You need to pick a different word.

NNnnoo... sorry, the WH *developed* that system, i.e., it's federal PROPERTY. It is PROPRIETARY to the Federal gov't, like the National Parks or military hardware. Therefore, owned by the people, as in, "we the people". Is this too hard for you to understand?