Friday morning at the Tech@State event at the State Department, the White House's New Media Director Macon Phillips announced the White House’s second code release to the open source community that powers the Drupal content management system.
Today’s code release constitutes a few modules we developed for ourselves, as well as a recognition of our sponsoring the development of modules widely used in the Drupal community, which improve the administration of our site in a variety of ways: file management, content presentation, and URL shortening are just a few examples.
For the code originating from within the White House, we wanted to improve the functionality offered by a popular file manager,
IMCE, so we developed a module called
IMCE tools, which has three major functions:
First, IMCE Directory Manager provides an interface for specifying which directories a user can access via the IMCE module. It is useful when you have users which have the same user roles but need to be confined to directories which cannot be derived from user data.
Second, IMCE Search allows for searching for files in the IMCE interface which helps identify the location of uploaded files.
Third, IMCE File Path easily presents the url of a file, facilitating sharing it as a link.
We also recognize that there are really good projects already embedded in the Drupal community and reached out to help support their development. Several of these are used in the collaboration software suite,
Open Atrium:
Features,
Spaces,
Boxes,
Context,
StrongArm, and
Admin. We also supported the development of an auto-tagging module,
Calais, a bulk file uploading utility,
IMCE SWFupload, as well as the module that powers our shortened
wh.gov domain,
shortURL.