Twitter may have been a vital tool in both election campaigns, but it wasn’t the only bird backing Hillary.

The US presidential election campaign needed a website that was scalable and flexible, and a content management system (CMS) that could power multiple sites and applications. In bobbed Wagtail, the open source CMS originally developed by digital agency Torchbox.

Tom Dyson, technical director at Torchbox, commented: “Learning that the Clinton campaign site was going to run on Wagtail was a big moment for us. We met the team in Brooklyn, which was an amazing experience, living up to all my West Wing-informed notions about what a US presidential campaign HQ should feel like: high security, posters stuck on all the walls, super smart people walking and talking fast.

"We learned a lot from H4A’s very expert web team and we were looking forward to announcing our tiny role in ushering in the USA’s first woman president. Things didn’t turn out quite how we planned, but we’re still proud that Wagtail powered what was – for a time – one of the world’s most high profile sites.”

First debuted for the Royal College of Art, Wagtail was launched as an open source CMS in 2014. Since then it has flown far and wide, building a base for some the world’s largest companies and organisations, including Google, NASA, MIT, Honda, USA.gov, Macmillan, Red Cross, Oxfam and Amnesty International.

You can read more on Torchbox's blog here.