Frogfoot loves Open Source Software — Pretty much everything we do is powered by it, including this website.

When we first decided to redo our website we chose to build it on top of the excellent Wordpress publishing platform. The reason for this was simple… Wordpress is both user friendly and powerful. We didn’t *need* Wordpress, but it makes the daily management of the website very easy… we like easy.

The biggest gripe with Wordpress is that most of the sites developed on top of it end up looking like, well, blogs… and often they look like one of the popular Wordpress themes that someone has modified.

Frogfoot is unique… we have our own style.

Once we had a design it was time for me to program the theme. Even though the site appears to use three different themes (Consumer, Business and Blog), it’s actually all one theme that I put together from scratch.

But the real magic here is the things we take for granted because they “just work”.

The site is running on a virtual server called a Xen box… What is a xen box I hear you asking? Xen is, as with all good things, Open Source. Xen allows Frogfoot to run multiple virtual servers on one real server. Each one of the virtual servers is completely independent of its “parent” and “siblings”. Which basically means that you can have complete control of your own Xen box on one of our servers… it’s like having your very own server for a fraction of the cost. We run our website on a Xen server with the exact same configuration and performance we sell to the public.

Running on our Xen server is Linux. Linux powers Frogfoot! On this particular server we’re running our standard Debian Etch Distro.

The web server is the amazingly powerful Apache web server running with PHP5 and the database is powered by MySQL 5. We get direct live access to the server by mounting directories with sshfs, a neat way of mounting directories on servers on the other side of the internet. I use The GIMP graphics editing program.

Here in my office I’m running Ubuntu Linux (Gutsy) and the best web browser around Firefox with a host of other open source tools that we all use constantly.

We hope you enjoy the site and check back regularly to read our blog.