Petopia engine
Posted: Sat Nov 06, 2010 3:00 pm
Not really about the forums but... I was curious, what software is Petopia running on?
I maintain the pet data in tab-separated text files and use PHP to load those into a MySQL database. (LOAD DATA INFILE - which I mention because I just found out about it a few months ago - has made my job a whole lot easier. Before that I was writing custom parsers for the data in PHP or Perl. Ugh, Perl. *shudder*)
I write all of the pages in PHP, using a custom wrapper around the Zend Framework for database access. In order to increase efficiency, though, I use a PHP script to dump the output of those pages to HTML, and that flat HTML is what you see on the site.
It took quite a while for this whole setup to develop but I'm pretty happy with where it is now. When I created Warcraft Mounts, I took a look at a lot of software packages but eventually decided that a simple MySQL + PHP setup akin to Petopia (although much simpler) would end up being easier for me.
As an aside: my husband and I both do web development professionally now, but when I started working with Petopia I was a C++ coder exclusively. Petopia was actually the impetus for learning more web development, which ended up coming in really handy when we left the corporate world and went self-employed.
Also - welcome to the forums (which are running on phpBB, of course).
