At the beginning, we had a whiteboard with the general idea of Unity's vision and what pieces they thought were critical for the beta release. Since the site was going to be launched in 12 weeks, we had a hard date that had to be met.

This site had to have some key functionality including:

• Video Hosting
• E-Commerce
• Search
• Forums and Other Community Features

The site hadn't been fully designed yet, and would eventually go through several iterations before a final design was settled on. This forced us to make sure that whatever we built could be rapidly modified to handle any look and feel changes.

To build the site in such a short amount of time, we knew we had to utilize as much "off the shelf" software as possible. Fortunately, all components except one were readily available, high quality Open Source components. We used:

• Symfony – For the web front end and administration tool
• Memcached – To make everything snappy!
• MySQL – To store everything
• Solr – For searching
• vBulletin – For our forum needs
• PHPAds – For ad serving

We also made extensive use of Amazon's web services and PayPal Pro payments integration.