Responsive User-Driven Site, Created with the Yii Framework
2012–2025
Hot Sauce Fever was a personal project to create a definitive reference list of hot sauces, that anyone could rate and review. I ran the website from 2012 until November 2025**. The idea was born when I started looking for a review site for hot sauce, like the ones that already existed for beer and wine. When I didn’t find anything, I decided to make it happen, with the help of designer Danny Day. I ended up choosing the Yii PHP Framework (the same framework that Craft CMS is built on), seeing that it was gaining a lot of traction at the time, and was a useful learning tool for a proper MVC (Model-View-Controller) structure.
The site was a fully responsive fluid-width site, with breakpoints dependent on both the design and resolutions. During the initial build, I kept in mind how it was going to have to change at smaller widths. For example, the 4 main navigation buttons around the logo were made a single list, with spacing applied to the 2nd and 3rd list items, knowing that they would have to push down. Perhaps you could call this planned-retrofit responsive design. This approach, without a specifically designed mobile or iPad-sized design, worked fine in this case, since I was the client.
Users could register for an account, verify by email, edit their profile, and reset their password. They could then submit a review, which uses a UI Slider, and custom JavaScript to display a letter grade as the rating slider is changed. New sauce information could be submitted with a review as well, if it was not already in the database. New hot sauces requirde approval, and users were notified by email once an admin approved their new entry. Some other features include a clickable autocomplete, blog, edit and delete options for reviews, CSS transitions, responsive slider, social media setup, initial data entry of 75 sauces, and more.
The site collected over 400 user submitted reviews, and 500 sauces. I’m also proud that the site got ranked #1 in Google for “Hot Sauce Reviews”. In November 2025, I made the difficult decision to shut the site down, partly because it had become more of a burden to maintain.
**Note: the domain name has been sold, so anything currently on the site is no longer connected to me.