Magento is a pretty powerful package, but also very enterprisey with very complicated db schema, and injection of behaviour with tons of xml in different layers, not my bag of tea. I understand why they chose PHP -- all the developers... but man the code looks like a mix between java from way back when and early wordpress.
I'm so sorry about that. It's killing me to see the site is down. I wonder if it is the HN effect, since it happened after I started getting traffic from here.
Still, that's no reason for the site to go down. It's a basic wordpress site. I should be able to handle traffic like this.
Update: I think it's okay now.
Magento is a law unto itself! Whatever Magento wills, Magento does.