Dave Cole, a senior advisor to the CIO of the Executive Office of the President, announced the code release this afternoon during a keynote at the DrupalCon trade show in downtown San Francisco.

WhiteHouse.gov released custom code used to develop their open platform built on Drupal. The majority of the code used in the web site of the White House is already open source, but developers are now releasing new code -distributed as Drupal modules- in order to benefit others.

Under the open-source model, thousands of people pick it apart simultaneously and increase security. It comes more cheaply than computer coding designed for a single client, such as the Executive Office of the President.

While attending DrupalCon San Francisco 2010 last week, I got a chance to catch up with Dries Buytaert, founder and project lead of Drupal to get some insight beyond the bits and bytes. We talked about the open source way and some of the things he's learned over the past 10 years.

"After one year of development we are ready to release Drupal 6.0 to the world. Thanks to the tireless work of the Drupal community, over 1,600 issues have been resolved during the Drupal 6.0 release cycle. These changes are evident in Drupal 6's major usability improvements, security and maintainability advancements, friendlier installer, and expanded development framework. Further, from bug fix to feature request, these issues follow-through on the Drupal project's continued commitment to deliver flexibility and power to themers and developers."

In the United States, the White House has led the march towards open source and free software by switching the http://www.whitehouse.gov/ website to the Drupal content management system. The government of the United Kingdom has decided to follow their lead.

Drupal 6 JavaScript and jQuery will help put jQuery, AJAX, and JavaScript effects into your Drupal 6 modules and themes.One will be able to learn about JavaScript support in Drupal 6.

The annual DrupalCon conference is coming up, April 19th to 21st at San Francisco's Moscone Center. Drupal, of course, is the increasingly popular open source content management system founded by Dries Buytaert, and OStatic itself runs on the platform.

I don’t hate Drupal. I admit I don’t like it too much but this is not the point of the post. The point is not to bash Drupal vs WordPress. It’s only to explain why it will be never as popular. If you plan to invest in Drupal for your new site, or in creating Drupal extensions for sale, or to grow a career in Drupal development, and so on, popularity is important thing to consider.