当得知白宫的新网站Recovery.gov采用免费的，开源内容管理系统平台Drupal时，众多Drupal开发者都为此欢呼雀跃。
在Recovery.gov之前，高调采用Drupal平台的网站可能就是Onion网站。但这不是让Drupal爱好者感到兴奋的唯一原因，笔者曾经向两位CMS（内容管理系统）专家朋友询问其中的状况，以下的原因能够解释为何Recovery.gov会大量采用Drupal平台：
首先，最现实的问题是，Drupal是免费的，按照目前的经济状况，转向开源可以节省纳税人的钱。
第二，这说明了白宫并没有就“社区合作开发的软件对于政府部门来说不够稳定和安全”的问题作过多的争辩。
第三，按理说，Drupal正在不断进步，它在民主政治方面有很深的根基，第一次引起政界注意的是Dean Space下的基金会出现，无论在哪个州，Drupal都拥有足够多的开发者社区进行开发。（还有David Cohn所写的Drupal政治历史）
最后，Recovery.gov采用Drupal标志着白宫正和Blue State Digital一起从事开源工作，该公司是奥巴马竞选时的Internet大本营。BSD采用自己私有的CMS。
作为社区共建的系统，Drupal依赖于开发者对代码进行改进，虽然白宫也可以开发出一些构建和节点，但终归还是的回到Drupal世界去。
The Obama administration has apparently opted to forbid Google and other search engines from indexing any content on the newly launched Recovery.gov.
Is this even more evidence that the administration‘s much-publicized commitment to transparency is simply hype？
Recovery.gov， which went live Tuesday， is set to act as a central clearinghouse for information related to the newly signed American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The legislation is designed to stimulate the flagging U.S. economy.
In a video message， available on YouTube and embedded into the new site， President Obama states that the “size and scale of （the stimulus） plan demands unprecedented efforts to root out waste， inefficiency， and unnecessary spending. Recovery.gov will be the online portal for these efforts.” He adds that the new site will be used to publish information on how the stimulus funds will be spent in a “timely， targeted， and transparent manner.”
Although the site is advertised as proof of the president’s commitment to transparency， its technical design seems to betray that spirit. Most importantly， the site currently blocks all requests by search engines， which would ordinarily download and index each page to make the information more accessible to the Web-searching public.
The site‘s robots.txt file has just a few lines of text：
# Deny all search bots， web spiders
User-agent： *
Disallow： /
Although the White House Web team did not immediately respond to a request for comment， the single-line comment at the top of the file indicates that the blocking of search engines is no accident but rather a statement of policy.
Many sites use a robots.txt file to communicate， in machine-readable terms， the Web pages that they do and don’t wish to be indexed by search engines. While the files don‘t carry much， if any， legal weight， most search engines act as good Internet citizens and honor the requests.
Luckily for the millions of Americans who might wish to find out how their money is going to be spent， it seems that Google has opted to ignore the administration’s restrictive robots.txt on the stimulus-related site. It is unclear if this is due to an error or a manual override by someone at Google， but a quick search turns up more than 60 Web pages on Recovery.gov that have been indexed by the search engine‘s Web crawlers in just the past three days.
Also， the stimulus bill requires that the site be run by the new Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board， but it seems to currently be under the control of the White House Web team--the same folks who revamped Whitehouse.gov and whose use of the robots.txt search engine-blocking code was expanded after the site initially was praised by bloggers for its openness.
It is this blogger’s hope that with a bit of gentle prodding by members of the pro-transparency community， Recovery.gov‘s administrators will correct the “unintentional oversight” that was made in launching the site with such an restrictive robots.txt file.
