Wicked Plum is built on WordPress, the most popular website platform on the internet today. We built Wicked Plum on WordPress because it’s a simple, straightforward, user-friendly way for non-tech people to do wonderful things on the internet, like run a store. We took the standard WordPress package, added the ability to set up shop, so to speak, and focused on making it even easier to use.
WordPress isn’t the only star on the team, however. Rounding out the lineup are Mal’s E-Commerce for shopping cart software, a custom inventory management script, and a whole host of other things that we’ll get around to writing about eventually.
Open Source?
WordPress, along with a lot of the technology we use in-house, is an open-source project. There are a lot of really nerdy reasons why open-source technology is vital to the internet, why it’s a critical model for software development, why well-supported open-source projects can be more secure than their closed-source competitors, and why open-source is good for democracy, and we believe every single one of them. The reason you care about open-source technology: it lets you pay for expertise, not software.
Here’s the thing. On the internet, two things are always true. First, everything is free somewhere. Second, nerds always tweak whether they’re paid to or not. Open Source software embraces these truisms. Software that could be stolen is given away. Code that could be licensed as a business property is widely shared. Instead of paying for the privilege of having a program at all, you can put your money into making it awesome.
And so we use open-source software wherever and whenever we can, and plan to release Wicked Plum under GPL in the future after it’s been fully developed.
