I decided early on when I built Appleseed that I wanted it to be a commodity platform, so I went with a very basic LAMP stack. I'm even shying away from PHP 5.

I decided early on when I built Appleseed that I wanted it to be a commodity platform, so I went with a very basic LAMP stack. I'm even shying away from PHP 5.3 because so many hosts still don't support it. It hasn't always been easy, but part of the way I see distributed open-source social networking catching on is by encouraging communities to set up their own social networks (churches, schools, niche communities, etc.), and the best way to make that happen is to make it as easy and streamlined as possible. Overall, it hasn't been terrible. Once I built a solid MVC framework and plugged in some good libraries (I cannot say enough good things about simple_html_dom), I was able to forget about the language, and focus on the logic, which is where I'm happiest.