Overview

Expressobeans is built on a standard set of technogies. The site can be broken down into 5 basic components: Art Guide, Wiki, Forum, Chat and Storefront.

The basic site exist on the follow platform.

Red Hat Entrprise Linux 

This is the operating system.

Apache Web Server 

This is the web server.

Art Guide

The art guide is a custom hand written application. It is built using

PHP 

This programming language.

Smarty 

Used to seperate the code from the user interface and also to facilitate some page caching.

PHP Mailer 

Used for sending emails.

JpGraph 

Used for creating charts.

Pear:HTML AJAX 

AJAX engine used to provide a enhanced user experience letting us change things on pages that are already loaded. This is used for the search filters, personal message status, and the random art control to name a few.

Pear:MDB2 

Used as a database abstraction layer.

Pear:Log 

A backend logger to keep ulgy messages off the screen and into a place where they can be used.

ImageMagic 

Used to process images, such as change the sizes, optimize and add watermarks.

Wiki

MediaWiki 

A great turn key application. We integrated it with our Samrty template engine, added user management, and then reverse integrated core pages for Artists and Bands from the Art Guide into the Wiki.

Storefront

osCommerce 

This turnkey application mangages the EB store. We had to add several community patches to get the functionality we needed. The application is very difficult to integrate with. It seems to be designed as "the site" as opposed to being just "part of a site". As a result, it will be taken out in the future.

Forum

phpBB 

This is the base application that the EB Forum is built on. We only created the look and feel templates, and integrated the user management with the main site.

Chat

FlashChat 

This application had a flash bades interface. We integrated the adminstration functions with the main site and also integrated the user management.