Every day, tens of thousands of developers from businesses, colleges, and homes contribute patches or new code to open-source programs. It’s not every day though that the White House does it. That’s exactly what happened last week when the White House’s New Media Director Macon Phillips announced the White House’s second code release to the open-source Drupal content management system (CMS).

Drupal, for those of you who don’t know it, is an excellent CMS. According to a 2010 survey by Water & Stone, a digital marketing agency, “WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal dominate the marketshare (PDF Link) and brand strength ratings in the open source CMS market. The Big Three lead in almost every metric and we have seen little this year to indicate that their leadership is being challenged in the near term. ”

It’s easy to see why. While WordPress is great for blogging, and indeed it can be used for massive publishing platforms such as ZDNet, but you have to built onto WordPress to make it a full-scale CMS. While, starting with WordPress 3.x, the popular blogging program is becoming more and more like a complete CMS Drupal, along with Joomla!, work well for people who want a ready-go-platform for sophisticated CMSs.

That’s one of the reasons why Obama’s White House went with Drupal. Since then, the White House hasn’t just used it. They’ve contributed to it.

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