CoffeeCup - HTML Editor, Flash & Web Design Software

We've received quite a few emails asking us what we use to make and power our Website. There are lot of things happening 'behind the scenes' on our site. Here is a little overview of what it takes to brew the Website and keep it fresh.

About the Code

The entire system is built on LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, & PHP). We are currently running Apache 1.3, PHP 4.3.1, and MySQL 4.1.7. Since we have a LOT of pages we decided a long time ago to use the Smarty Template Engine to make things easier to maintain.

As you may have noticed we have some nifty tricks on the site too. We are using some creative XHTML, CSS, Flash, JavaScript, and other great technologies to make it all happen. If you look at the source code of our site you will see text links instead of images for our main navigation. We use a modified version of Fahrner Image Replacement to replace the text links with nice images. A little DOM Scripting and AJAX makes the 'What do you think' and 'Tell a Friend' forms work. We've chosen sIFR (Scalable Inman Flash Replacement) to create the nice dynamic text headers for the entire site.

The entire Website should validate as XHTML 1.0 Transitional and CSS 1.0. We try to make everything as compliant as possible, but sometimes you just have to sacrifice standards for usability and browser compatability.

About the Hardware

We use the RedHat Enterprise Server operating system on all our servers. The Website lives behind a nice Cisco Firewall on a set of load balanced Dell servers with dual 2.4 Ghz processors and 2GB of Ram each. We also have a development server, a staging server, a dedicated database server for MySQL with 4GB of RAM, and a backup server running a MySQL replicant. Everything gets backed up to a local cached copy 6 times a day on our backup server and there is also a SAN backup that takes nightly snapshots of the entire system. Everything is connected together with dual Gigibit Ethernet on a private network. It's all quite nice to work on we must say :)

So do we use our own software?

Yes! Each of us has our favorite program. The HTML Editor and DirectFTP probably get the most use and abuse by our team. Of course we use other software too: Adobe Photoshop, SecureCRT, and VIM are all part of our toolkit. We also use BaseCamp and TRAC for project management and bug tracking, with SVN for version control.