I currently work for
Silicon Mechanics, a hardware provider for thousands of popular companies (Groupee included). I recently became the lead dev, and we're working on some awesome stuff. The world of commercial software is a very, very different place than the world of business-specific solutions. Being able to say "Thou Shalt Not Use Internet Explorer On The Intranet App" is
delicious. On the other hand, running Vista in a VM in order to do compat testing on the website, not so delicious.
I'm going to be switching my own forums to a custom solution some time in the near future. I've
written custom forum solutions before, but the code's never been good enough to release or has been too specific to the site. The iteration I'll be putting up on Flare is likely to be based on
Plack and
Moose, as an entertaining experiment. Tomorrow I'm going to be working with
Solr to finally add searchability to the LO site. (MySQL full text indexing sucks and isn't available on InnoDB, as most of you should be aware.)
Site-specificness is one of the things I've become passionate about in the past four years. Too many site owners are satisfied simply taking some commercial off-the-shelf solution and sticking it on their site. If you're serious about your site, you're going to spend time making sure that every bit of it is properly integrated and flows well together. For example, the Leftovers site is actually composed of two entirely different pieces of software, the portal/forums/mini-CMS and the calendar/points/slotting app. The other developer and I worked together to make each app mesh together. I wish that more site owners would make that kind of effort.
(On the other hand, custom software sometimes can be a bad thing. I recently spent an inordinate amount of time updating the LO codebase. I originally wrote it on top of Zend Framework 0.something, and there have been so many changes since the 0.x series that upgrading to the latest 1.x versions was a horrible challenge in places. Never write serious code in something you're new with!)
