In 2006 my university academic IT support group was approached by an academic colleague wanting to start a new journal to be available in electronic form only. The technical capabilities of the author pool, the requirements of the discipline, and — unsurprisingly — the lack of financial resources, imposed restrictions on the design of the publishing system. We implemented a system using only open source software, building it largely from scratch as the existing open source journal publishing systems at the time, although comprehensive and well-established, seemed far too large and complex for the task. I describe the process, explain the background to the design decisions made, and attempt to draw some conclusions about the technical viability of creating a small-scale publishing system which attempted to retain XML throughout the workflow, and about the human factors which influenced the decisions.