LA Moves To Drupal To Improve Website Management

Los Angeles will move its 40 sites to the open platform and add features such as user notifications, subscriptions, and event registration.

By any measure, the city of Los Angeles is a big place -- the most populous city in California and second only to New York in the United States. It's a sprawling 500 square miles in size and vulnerable to natural disasters ranging from earthquakes to wildfires. Residents speak many languages besides English. All in all, providing municipal services can be challenging.

To help Los Angeles not only provide its services over the Internet but also lay the groundwork for expanding services, the city's Information Technology Agency (ITA) is migrating more than 20 of its public-facing websites from its Oracle content management system to the Drupal open platform. The agency chose Acquia of Burlington, Mass., to assist in the migration.

"There was an urgency to replace our nearly 10-year-old content management system," Ted Ross, assistant general manager of ITA, said in an email interview. "In a rapidly evolving technology like the web, it was not delivering enough value to those managing the websites or the citizens using them… We needed an enterprise CMS that could keep pace with the new capabilities and functions that are increasingly becoming available."...