CKAN has been around for awhile AFAIK, back even in the Drupal 5.x days, there was a CKAN module for Drupal.

From CKAN's webpage:

http://ckan.org

> Strong integration with third-party CMS’s like Drupal and WordPress

There was no explicit reason to switch front-end sites...But think about it...creating Data.gov was a large endeavor, but it's certainly not a mission critical one. Just a couple years after building that initiative from scratch, they throw out Drupal for WordPress instead of using their existing Drupal installation and installing CKAN modules. How does that not reflect badly on Drupal, which bills itself as a much more powerful, flexible CMS than your standard blog system?

Yes you are right about that, but I'm thinking that Drupal was the wrong backend for that system to begin with. If you're using the wrong tool, it's the makers of the system that are at fault, not Drupal. I mean Drupal is used by many popular sites with success, most are switching to Drupal, not from it. As you say, Drupal is a CMS system. It's not a data platform. Think newspapers vs data.gov. From my perspective you could make data.gov in Drupal no problem, but that doesn't mean you couldn't do it better, faster, easier with some more specialized software. CKAN does all these things Drupal does not (http://ckan.org/features/) that 99% using Drupal don't need. Looking at that it seems strange to me they chose Drupal to begin with.

Yes...you and I are in agreeance here...and to be fair to the government, I would argue 99% of clients don't exactly know what they need. I'm not arguing that Drupal is always wrong, or that it is inherently bad...I'm arguing that it provides too much for what users actually need...that it was dropped for Wordpress is an indication that they thought Drupal itself could be the data-handling platform. Hell, they probably don't even need WordPress and could probably do much of it in Jekyll or some other static deployment.

I used Drupal back in the 5.x days and thought it was pretty swell, but that was when I was a rookie developer who had almost no real full-stack dev experience. Now I can't think of a single use case in which Drupal's purported feature set is needed that would not be better fulfilled by just going to Django/Rails. The hackery that seemingly has to be done to meet clients' perceived needs almost eliminates whatever advantage Drupal in terms of a community of knowledgable developers to hire from. And I would question whether there are really more Drupal-only developers than Rails-only developers (certainly, there are way more Wordpress developers).