About Iluvana

Iluvana started in 2008 as a solution to a growing problem. I was doing web development at a marketing company in Santa Barbara, building websites with Adobe Dreamweaver and managing them with scripts that would update shared components, like headers and footers, across an entire website. As the web work grew, managing sites with these disjointed scripts became difficult. I needed a better system.

By 2010, I had built a working management system based on a three-panel interface. Since the marketing firm had "27" in its name, I called it 27panels. It was built solely to make my job easier, and for many years, I was the only one using it.

The system kept evolving and growing. Eventually, other employees started using it as well. They only had access to individual sites, but I developed an interface, an Administrative View, that let me switch from one client site to another all within the same system. Still, I needed a component that could interact with the codebase for each client. The Administrative View allowed me to connect to any number of databases, but I needed to manage pages, articles and metadata, and run SEO diagnostics. That led me to develop a small component, which I embedded into the Administrative interface. It gave me the functionality I needed and allowed me to build out features separately from the rest of the interface. This component is what I called Iluvana.

For fifteen years, our company operated this way. We managed all our client websites, and when clients wanted changes, they asked us to make them. The system had grown far beyond those original scripts, but it remained entirely internal to our operations.

Then in May 2025, one of our clients made an unexpected request. They wanted to manage their own website. This put me in a difficult position. We didn't have a content management system for clients. All we had was Iluvana, which was built into the Administrative View, and an old version of 27panels that hadn't been updated for years. The old system wasn't very good, but since clients never used it, that hadn't mattered. Now I had three choices: decline the request and remind the client they were under a managed system, spend time bringing the old 27panels up to current standards, or find a way to release Iluvana.

Updating 27panels wasn't practical. The codebase was outdated. If the client wanted to work on their own site, the only real solution was to decouple Iluvana from the Administrative View. This turned out to be a delicate task. As I removed Iluvana's functionality, the Administrative View needed code blocks to handle data that was now passing between functions that no longer knew what to do with it. Little by little, as each feature was detached and reconnected to work independently, Iluvana took shape as a standalone system.

By the time the work was finished, we had a standalone management platform. The old 27panels was gone, and in its place was Iluvana. What started as scripts to manage website components had evolved into a full-blown content management system and the foundation for our hosting platform.