At Walking Dolphins Consultancy Inc. we are pretty adamant about not reinventing wheels.

Too many clients pay over and over again for code that has already been written.

So we present here the tools we use that are available for anyone to employ in doing-it-yourself or acting for a client. Most are free open source. Some cost a little. Those that come with a price tag are dramatically less expensive than paying someone to code the same solution from scratch. We do expect clients to make a modest contribution to authors or designers where the theme or script is central to the operation of the site.

PHP
MySQL
WordPress.org — the free open source web development platform
The GNU General Public License by Free Software Foundation, Inc.
FileZilla FTP Client by Tim Koss
ConText text editor by SynEdit Development Team and Jordan Russell

s2Member Pro Module S2Member — provides secure Membership capability, including integration with PayPal if you need to charge for access to part or all of your site. The Pro Module provides full integration with PayPalPro and allows for virtually unlimited extension and customization for moderately skilled coders. No additional coding is required, so non-techs can deploy a full, secure pay system immediately while those with some skills may choose to exploit the wider range of opportunities. We love this tool.

PriMoThemes.com is one of several design houses we use to get a base look and feel for sites. The amount of time you save from trying to code from scratch is easily worth the modest license or subscription fees.

There are many free themes available that can be found using a trivial search. Here are some that we have or are using:

Arjun X  http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/arjuna-x

The following list is copied from some of our Plugin control panels. We do not use all tools on all sites and on some sites we use no third-party tools at all. We present it as acknowledgment to the coders and as a resource-by-example for others.