I support the use of open source software (OSS). I love using it, and unless it is impossible to find an adequate OSS equivalent I would choose it over a proprietary version any day. When undertaking the redevelopment of my website, apart from my personal time, I sought to construct it using only software and knowledge that was freely available to me. Thankfully, that is quite a lot these days.
My development platform consisted of my laptop, running an older distro of Ubuntu Linux, with a LAMP stack installed locally. My text editor of choice is gedit (GNOME Edit), it’s a plain text editor, no flashy IDE for me. It has syntax highlighting, which is all you really need these days.
I chose a CMS platform I know well, that being WordPress. I have been using it on and off for the last 5 years (amongst others), and I think it’s streets ahead of other open source CMS software, not only as a blogging platform, which is it’s core function, but for building fully integrated websites and webapps. It’s an extremely flexible platform, especially when you take the time to drill down into what it can do.