We’re really grateful to the countless people who invest their time into open-source software and tools and life would be a hell of a lot harder if it weren’t for you.
Special Mentions
Zend Framework 2
We use ZF2 a lot. It’s an enterprise framework and library and we use it build the vast majority of web sites and back-office software we write. We love it’s exacting nature and over the years through early betas, version 1 and the newer 2 series, we’ve learnt a great deal from using it.
You can find out more about ZF2 on the framework website (Nerds only!)
jQuery
jQuery is a javascript library that you have probably heard of. It makes writing javascript that interacts with the DOM a lot quicker and easier. We use it, as do most other web designers. It’s still nice to say thanks though.
Doctrine ORM, ODM & DBAL
The Doctrine Project is very often our go-to ORM and ODM. We think it’s awesome.
PHP Unit
It’s rare for us to use any other Unit testing framework and PHP Unit helps us keep our code in good shape.
And a lot more…
We could go on for a very long time, so whilst no-less important or awesome, here’s a load more stuff that we use all of time:
Front-end frameworks Foundation and Bootstrap which use the CSS Pre-Processors Less and SASS. We use Code Kit (Which isn’t OSS but we love it so much) to compile most of our frontend stuff and of course this includes Bower. Lots of PHP libraries and tools from Symfony, Guzzle, Carbon, Composer and many more.
We haven’t even got started on server software and languages such as Apache, MySQL, PHP, Haproxy, Mongo DB, Postgres, Redis, Memcached, Varnish Cache, Nginx, Gluster… The list goes on and on and there’s been no mention yet of all the amazing operating systems we use.
Needless to say, a lot of people have dedicated their time, skills, knowledge to most of what you see on the net today for nothing and it’s good to remember to say thanks every once in a while. We try to give back as best we can with contributions and open-sourcing our own work and you can help too. If you use a bit of great software that you got for nowt, next time you see a donate button on their website, bung a few quid their way.