A friend of mine came over and saw me on the website and mentioned she would love to have something (not as involved) like this for her small private group.  Does anyone know if this website is based one of those programs like joomla or wordpress? or is it done with something else?  Any help I can relay to her to get it started would be great.  Thanks

There are tons of resources out there! If she's looking to build something like a forum, there's [www.proboards.com] and [www.invisionfree.com] and [www.bigtent.com]

I don't know what sort of software Veena uses, but there are loads of options out there for your friend. I hope this helps some. :)

Thank-you for the compliment.   StudioVeena.Com is run off a completely custom peice of software designed to handle our large traffic base and provide a very custom set of features.  It requires a bare minimum of 6 servers to handle all its components so it isn't a good candidate for a smaller implementation. For something small I would definitely suggest something in line with elgg found at [www.elgg.org] .

Elgg is probably the closest you will find to our software and it'll be able to run on a small shared server.