The whole site (including LGBT News) is built from scratch, using PHP and MySQL. I came across a few turnkey Hacker News sites, but didn't really like any of them. I decided to build LGBT News from scratch just because I thought it'd be easier to integrate into the existing site, and I thought it'd be a fun project (I usually tend to do that for the learning experience).

Login uses Facebook Login (which has been a huge headache), countries and regions were implemented using an ISO database, and some of the additional data (population, religions, etc.) comes from Freebase.