I wish I could say that DIY Bride is the product of a dedicated team of smartypants nerdly types who bring together the best in custom blog technologies and web gadgety goodness but I can’t. It’s just me here toiling away on the backend and trying my best to figure it all out without, you know, killing the site (which I’ve done more than once).

Keeping the site running is truly the toughest part of my job and something that I can’t readily afford to outsource. I depend a great deal on free (or nearly free) solutions and that means a lot of researching, learning, tweaking, and hoping I don’t mess up anything too much. ‘Tis the nature of being DIYer, right? Don’t get me wrong – I do kind of dig getting my inner nerd on but it’s only by necessity that I even bother to get this in depth with the stuff that I do.

2009 brought tremendous growth and, with that, came tech challenges I wasn’t really prepared to handle. Massively important lessons about manageable growth, outsourcing and patience came my way. I have big HUGE plans for DIY Bride but I’m on a more realistic schedule for getting to there. Finding the balance of what my community members want/need and what I can do on my own is the hard part of the equation.

Some of you have asked me about the tech behind DIY Bride. Here’s what I’ve got goin’ on:

• DIY Bride blog runs on self-hosted Wordpress platform. I adore WP! I’ve been using it since 2005/2006. I use free and paid off-the-shelf plugins, available to the general WP population.
• I host at Hostgator. I’ve bounced around to other hosting companies but keep coming back to HG. It’s been the most reliable, affordable, and easy-to-deal-with host I’ve encountered.
• I was using Joomla to handle the social network/community. I love the idea of Joomla (started using it when it was just a beta of Mambo years and years ago – pardon my geeky nostalgia here but it was the first big tech thing I ever got into) but really hate it in “real world” usage. There’s promise there but it’s too far outside of my skill level, patience, and needs to make it a practical solution for DIY Bride right now.
• Before Joomla I had toyed with Wordpress Mu but it wasn’t really suitable for what I was looking for at that time. Since I abandoned Mu over a year ago, BuddyPress was launched and looks like the contender for the great community features I have in store for the site. I’ve checked out Dolphin and Elgg and some hosted solutions but none really appeal as much as BP.
• The forums are now integrated with the main site (but not yet available for member usage). I’ve used phpBB, vBulletin, and Kunena in the past;  Simple:Press is the newest forum package.
• It’s no secret that I’ve been developing an ecommerce wing of DIY Bride. I’ve been playing around with a ton of different shop solutions (from free to $300) with various degrees of satisfaction. Haven’t found that perfect fit yet  and I’m mourning that 300 bucks right now.
• I develop my site offline on my own localhost server before it goes live. On my Mac I use MAMP to set up my dev area.