How is this web site (www.devshed.com) get built?

I know it uses PHP and probabily MySQL. But do they use some other package on top of it as a starting point? Or is it all done from scratch?

Any idea how many manpower and time are needed to build a site (just the framework) like this?

This animal is called zope and it lives in this cage

Indeed, the system we use for the www.devshed.com site is Zope. It used to run under a PHP system that we wrote entirely from scratch, but we decided that it needed an upgrade about a year and a half ago, and rewrote it entirely in Zope. It makes it more manageable. The forums are PHP based, however. They are run using a commercial product called vBulletin. (http://www.vbulletin.com)

Thanks for the reply from AlCapone and ZeUS. Your information are very helpful for my curiousity. This is really a good site to get all kind of questions answered.