What is Flooha?
While cleaning up some files, I ran across this introduction to Flooha that I had written a few years ago. My intention was to flesh out the concepts and I never had any plan to show it to anyone. Hopefully, it will be interesting enough to generate some conversation. I’m guessing a high percentage of responses would be tl;dr. LOL
What is Flooha.com?
Flooha.com is a communally driven website where users can download open source software in which the source code has been automatically generated, according to the user’s choice of addons and modules submitted by other users. Flooha Inc. is also a web hosting company. Customers of Flooha have the option to have this generated software installed automatically to their website. The user can add or remove addons at any time and will also receive automatic updates when their software can be updated with newer versions of the addons which contain new functionality or bug fixes. Anyone can build and download software for free from Flooha.com, but users who are not Flooha customers must download and install the software themselves or they also have the option to pay a Flooha technician to install the software on their server. Flooha.com provides forums for users to discuss issues and request help with problems.
Why do we need this?
The power of open source code lies in the user’s ability to modify and share the code with others. Most open source projects have a user base which contributes modifications to the original source code. These “modules” or “addons” add new functionality or change the current functionality to suit the user’s needs.
The easiest addons to install are typically called “modules”, plugins, addons, or extensions because of their modular nature. Modules are simply additions which can be installed with a few clicks and do not modify the original source code, known as the “core source code”. The most difficult to install are normally referred to as “contributions” and they often change the core source code dramatically. The installation process for these addons can be extremely difficult because the user must search for a specific section of the code and change it according to the instructions in the addon. The possibility of making mistakes when modifying the source code is very high and non-programmers often find this process impossible to complete successfully. The smallest mistake can break the application completely, at worst, and at best it could cause unexpected errors. Installing a hand full of addons which change the source code can require days or weeks of code editing and testing depending on the user’s skill. Clearly it would be best if all addons could be modular, but this is not practical for many reasons, not the least of which is the fact that some programmers just don’t think about modularity when writing the core source code. This doesn’t make their code “bad” per se because their application could be the best in it’s class, but in no way modular.
Even if all open source projects where modular in nature, the open source community’s addons would still suffer from lack of organization. It is the nature of such a collaborative environment to be loosely organized and this facilitates greater freedom and flexibility but also creates a sometimes frustratingly complex environment where even experienced developers can become lost in the jungle of changes. It is common for the core developers to offer web space to upload and download addons but it is basically a “User Beware” mentality and very rare for the core developers to offer any support, certification or organization of these addons. User’s can spend inordinate amounts of time searching for the module they need, trying to determine which version of the module would be best for them and then installing, testing and checking for conflicts with other addons. The core developers also commonly provide a forum to discuss modules but the threads for specific modules are often not tied to the addon in any way and multiple threads are created which rehash the same issues. Also, it is not uncommon for a addon to be updated and changed on a weekly or even daily basis and the work to maintain an application can increase exponentially with each addon added. The problems associated with addons that change the core source code become painfully evident when a new version is submitted by the core developers. If the user has made significant modification to the core, upgrading to the new version can be a nightmare and sometimes completely impossible. This is a major drawback because often the new version includes critical security updates and bug fixes which will cause problems for the user in the future if they are not installed.
The goal of Flooha.com is to eliminate or minimize these problems as well as the work involved in creating and installing addons.
How is this achieved?
The main concept of Flooha.com is to create addons where the user uploads the necessary files for the addon in zip format. The Flooha system analyzes the code and makes it available to be installed. After the addon is created, any user can then select it as part of their download package and it will be installed automatically along with any other selected addons. While this concept seems simple, you have to realize what is really happening here. Instead of spending hours, days, weeks or even months searching for, downloading, unzipping, reading the instructions, installing, testing and checking each addon for conflicts, the user has simply clicked a few boxes and received a completed package with everything already installed. In most cases the user will still have to perform some addon specific setup during or after the installation of the package, such as configuring the addon according to their preferences, but this is not something that can be avoided. Documentation for each addon is provided with each package as well as post installation instructions.
In some cases, addons will conflict or appear to conflict and the Flooha “builder” can detect these possible conflicts between addons. For instance, if two addons edit the same line of code in the same file, it is probable that this will cause errors. Before building the package, the builder will check all of the addons against each other to identify possible conflicts and it will then give the user the option to remove any of the conflicting addons or to ignore these conflicts and log the warnings and errors. The builder then builds the package one addon at a time and if a change is not possible it is logged, specifying the addon and the code that could not be changed because of a conflict. The user can then evaluate the code manually and merge the code that could not be installed automatically. It is actually quite amazing how a source code file can be changed by many addons without causing any conflicts. Also, the user can then submit a “glue” addon which is actually two addons in one package that have been fixed so that they do not conflict. If these two conflicting addons are selected in the future for installation by another user, the “glue” addon will be used, thus preventing a future conflict.
Well, there it is. I’d love to hear what you think!
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New: Private addons and additional domains.
We’re excited to announce some changes here at Flooha.com.
Private Addons
Flooha web hosting account holders can now upload private addons. These addons will only be viewable and available to your account. So, if you’ve purchased a theme or addon, you don’t have to worry about anyone else using it on their website. Private addons are also great for plugin and theme developers to test their addons without the worry of users experiencing bugs before the final version is ready. Log in and upload your private addons now!
Additional Domains
Professional and Business web hosting account holders can now manage additional domains. We’ve increased the Professional account to 5 domain and the Business account to unlimited domains. We’ve had an overwhelming request for this feature and here it is! Check out the different Flooha web hosting accounts.
Flooha Web Hosting Accounts
Flooha support forums now open
We’re happy to announce the opening of the Flooha support forums. Although it’s quite empty now, we hope to establish a thriving community where users and developers can help each other improve the software and websites built by Flooha.com.
Flooha is in beta status right now and basically that means that everything isn’t quite perfect yet and we’re trying to get as much use and feedback of the system that we can. It’s entirely possible that we’ve focused on the wrong features and we’re relying on you to tell us what you’d like to see.
So please sign up for the forums and let us know what you’re thinking about Flooha, no matter if it is good or bad. If we’ve got something terribly wrong and you know it, please tell us! Don’t be shy. We won’t bite, I promise. 
Our only goal is to make life easier and better for software developers and the people who use their software.
Also, if you have suggestions for forums to create like “Search Engine Optimization” or “Google Adwords”, please let us know and we will try to accommodate you. We want the forums to be as helpful as possible.
OK, so what are you waiting for? Go sign up!
We’ve been verbed!
Yesterday, Manoli sent an email to Juan Diego Polo, Co-founder of PoolDigital and editor of WWwhatsnew.com, one of the most visited blogs in Spanish about technology. She asked him if he would be interested in presenting Flooha.com as part of our launch. Juan was very excited about our new service and he blogged about it on WWwhatsnew.com.
The best part was the last sentence when he said “¿Quién necesita programar cuando se puede, simplemente Floohar?.”, which translates to “Who needs to program when you can simply Flooha?”. So, it’s official, we’ve been verbed!
Thanks Juan, you are officially the first person to use the verb “floohar” (to flooha), contratulations! 
Hacker News Love
The launch yesterday went great! We posted up on Hacker News, asking for our fellow hackers to review Flooha. We recieved a great majority of positive comments and a few that were fantastic. The only negativity came from the “kick-ass” part of our tag-line. We’re not in a hurry to change it since we think Flooha is pretty damn kick-ass and, although we are 100% serious about our business, we still want to inject a little light-heartedness into our business.
For those of you considering a “Review my app” post on HN, here are some results from our little experiment.
In the 24 hour period after the post we received:
- 1698 unique hits
- 7102 page views
- 917 uniques who only looked at the index page. (1 page view)
- 117 uniques with > 10 page views.
- 29 registered users
- 24 packages built
- 17 custom websites created
- 214 YouTube views (video tour)
- 1 application error*
- 0 melted web servers
* The user started a project, opened a new tab, deleted the project in tab2 and then tried to build it in tab1. We’re going to call that a “User Error” LOL We did add some code to handle it better though.
Not bad for day 1! It’s funny how some users seem to have registered just to grab an interesting name, most notably “heaven” and “earth”. We hope that Flooha can be a small slice of heaven and earth for some people. 
For those of you out there who want to grab a cool name before someone else does, you better hurry up!
We’ll be trying to get some more coverage this week from various startup websites and bloggers, so please digg us or stumble us or use whatever means you have to get the word out. If you like to get notified when our Premium Web Hosting Accounts are available, you can sign up for our waiting list here. Thanks for all the interest and well wishes.
Flooha beta officially launched!
After a lot of hard work, time and dedication, I’m very proud to announce the official lanuch of Flooha.com.
Our goal is to bring happiness to you by making the process of building your website an enjoyable and pain-free experience. We know how difficult and frustrating it can be for users to customize software to meet their needs. The internet is filled with forum posts of users pleading for help, desperate for an answer to a problem they are having with their website software. Whether it is how to correctly modify a file, how to set file permissions, or some other configuration issue, we see users encountering the same problems again and again no matter what app they are using.
Our solution to this problem is Flooha.com. We’ve made the process of building and installing customized website software as easy as surfing the web. You can choose an app and add-ons in much the same way you would shop for products online. Just point and click to add them to your project and click the magic “Build it” button when you’re done. OK, maybe it’s not magic, but if you’ve ever spent a significant amount of time customizing your website, it will seem like magic. It doesn’t even matter if the add-ons you select all modify the same file, Flooha will do it’s best to make the changes correctly, saving you a lot of time and headaches.
Everyone is free to build customized software packages on Flooha.com, no registration required. All of the apps and add-ons we currently offer are open source and you are free to modify or distribute them as you please. However, by registering with us, you can immediately create a live website at yourusername.flooha.com. After you’ve built your package, just click the “Install” button, answer a few simple configuration questions and Flooha will immediately install your custom package on a Flooha server. Not once will you have to download, unzip, open, modify, configure, upload, execute code or sql, or set permissions on anything in order to create a customized website. This is our promise to you.
You don’t have to be a programmer to have a kick-ass website.
Launch?
I had planned a more formal launch on Tuesday, but couldn’t resist responding to this thread on Hacker News. The thread is long, so maybe no one will notice. Or maybe not…we’ll see. If I get some traffic, I hope the site doesn’t explode. I’ll be sleeping about 10 minutes after this post. It could be an interesting morning!
Update:
We received a little traffic and 6 upvotes, but no comments. Our video tour got about 20 views and one anonymous user built a package. Today, I’ll be submitting the site to some smaller blogs and web app index sites in order to start slow. My next post will be about the official launch and what we’re all about.