We started building Flutter about 2 years ago. When we first started, it was just 3 of us in an office that we were sharing with another company. WordPress was one of the first platforms that we were building CMS sites for our clients. Most of the sites were informational that usually included blog functionality so WP made sense. One day, I started looking around for a solution that would allow me to create more panels to compose content specific to a particular section or piece of functionality on our site. The great folks at Ryhymed Code had developed a plugin called Custom Write Panel. It did exactly what it sounds like it does. It allowed you to create custom write panels and put different types of fields (checkboxes, dropdowns, etc) inside. The solution worked great until a new version of WordPress was released and we had to upgrade all our clients that were running on top of this plugin.
Time went by and the creators of the plugin didn’t seem like they were keeping the project active anymore but there were few active people on their forums to keep the buzz going. We were dependent enough on the plugin that we had to make it compatible with the newest version of WP. At the time, we called the plugin Fresh Page which is why to this day, if you try to download the plugin, you’ll be downloading a fresh-page.zip. We then ended up changing the name to Flutter. I honestly can’t even remember why we did this.
I was very skeptical to release it under GPL (I’ll cover in another post) in the WP plugins directory but our mods were really small and our intentions were to just release a compatible version of Custom Write Panel, not a whole new plugin. As the weeks went by, we started to add small features out of requests by our clients and we were releasing them to the public as we went. We added file uploads, then phphthumb, then color pickers, then edit in place, WPMU support and so on. People really liked the plugin but we never knew what to make of all of it. We’ve always had our core business which has kept us at a 150% booked rate since the inception of our company. The thing is that our core business continued to get into more and more complex web applications rather websites (info/blog) which meant that the amount of sites we were publishing on Flutter was decreasing by the day. At the height of internal (within Freshout) Flutter usage, we were using Flutter for about 85% of our projects and we are currently using it for about 25% of our projects.
Regardless of our path, the community was loving Flutter. With each release, we were seeing more and more interest but having never done this before, we didn’t know how to foster the community and when we did, we just didn’t have the time to do it right. We have been criticized quite a lot in the past year or so for being slow with support and lack of transparency with the product plan of Flutter. There is a good reason for that. It’s because there isn’t a clear product plan that’s centered around the community. The product plan is centered around what our clients ask us to build since that’s our source of revenue. We all have to make a living. Building free plugins and spending all night answering unpaid support emails is not how you do it. You do what you can but at the end of the day, you have to focus on your bread and butter if you want to survive.
I’m not sure if many of you (people who know us through WP/Flutter) know this but Freshout is a 25 person company. Even if we put the product out there for sale, the numbers wouldn’t even cover half the salary of the resources we would need to support the product. Not to mention the fact that we would have to release the source code for free as restricted by the GPL license. So I’m sure you get it. it’s a side project for us. It doesn’t mean that we don’t care. It just means that it’s not the only thing we do. I’d like to encourage anyone that is passionate about the plugin or cares at all to write tutorials, submit fixes, and get in touch with us about helping out with small tasks related to Flutter. We need your help. I thought this was implied. It’s a 2 way street.
I’d like to address one other topic. There are a number of other CMS plugins that were released after Flutter and directly “compete” with us. This is a concept that I just don’t understand in the GPL world. We’re not competing with any of you. We’re just sharing some of our code for other people that want to use it. That’s really it. We wish you the absolute best and hope that the WP users just get the best solution for them.
We will most likely be developing 3-4 more large scale sites before the end of the year that we might use Flutter for. If that is the case, Flutter will undergo some major clean up regardless of any other plugins that claim to do what Flutter does. We will know this before the end of October and will announce our plans with Flutter by that time. We’ve also heard that Matt Mullenweg might be working on something similar to Flutter so we’ll get in touch with him at some point to make sure we’re not overlapping with his work.
Over the next few weeks, we’re getting in touch with anyone who wants to help us put some serious energy back into Flutter. If you’re one of these people, hit me up.
