BoonEx, a leader in the Community and Social Networking software market, has release Dolphin 7. Disclaimer: Boonex is an advertiser. Dolphin was developed on a modular system, and BoonEx claims it easy to install default modules, such as a 100% Ajax based forum, file sharing, instant and simple messengers, audio/video chat, mailbox, music and video players, video recorder, a user’s profile customizer and more, and further – to disable them or add other third party modules.
One thing I’ve always said about dating site or community software is that you’re basically buying an administration system. Serving up a profile is easy, it’s the pay-wall, user and communications management that’s complicated. Various forms of security and anti-fraud solutions can make up a large portion of a dating site codebase as well.
A lot of dating software in the past didn’t upgrade easily. Unless your developers were skillful and really knew the system well, the version of Dolphin you built you site on was the version it stayed. This is bad for two primary reasons, functionality and security. You can’t take advantage of new features and hackers can deface or take down your site. This is true for blogs as well, a WordPress blog I host myself was recently hacked because I failed to install a single upgrade.
The ability to skin, or layer a specific design on Dolphin was a problem as well. If Dolphin is truly skinnable and modular, launching a site should require much less effort and expense. I’m going to throw a copy on a box and see how much the installation process and features have changed. Boonex Dolphin isn’t for everyone, but if you are looking for a customizable site-in-a-box, check out the Dolphin site and play around with the live demo. And don’t forget to let us know what you think.
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Do you think a small company with a huge niche could make it with site-in-a-box solution? Like everyone, I feel I have a great ideal for a site in my area. I’ve purchased a site-in-a-box solution, and am now in the testing phase. Do you know of any companies that started off with a site-in-a box and were successful?
Depends on what you consider successful. The software providers will say that thousands of sites run on their platforms, the sites are usually on the smaller size. I think software-in-a-box is an easy way to test out an assumption about a site. Especially if you have custom functionality in mind. I’m not sure just how large a Dolphin or SkaDate or any of the other systems can get before you outgrow the platform. At that point, hopefully you have enough revenue that you can upgrade the system.
Thank you!! I’ve been reading your site for about a year now. I’ve read the positives and the negatives about starting a site. If you were to consult with someone today about starting a site with a limited budget, would you push them away from it because of the capital and the market?
Strong team, a unique value proposition, well-funded and experience with online marketing are just some of the key factors that make up a successful dating startup. There will always be the outliers who come from nowhere, but the chances of starting a new dating site and living off the proceeds are slim in the best of times. Maybe you could look at a white label provider, which has it’s own pro’s and cons, but your time to market is about a day as opposed to weeks and months.
1) Start small and fast with existing software
2) Upgrade (or develop your own) technological platform if you finally need to.
Please note the word _if_. It means both validating your business plan and seeing if your site is going to survive when thousands of users rush there. Recently we’ve been working with SkaDate in such situations – in fact it takes a lot to sink the software on a decent dedicated hosting. You may be earning 5-6 figures at that point like some of our customers do. Or you can end up just paying hosting fees and not seeing any real activity whatsoever.
Too often people try to solve non-existent problems. Almost always you have time for maneuvers (unless you pour in a million dollars into a TV ad tomorrow). Software is overrated. Worthy ideas are rare.
Emil Sarnogoev
http://www.skadate.com
I love the new Dolphin 7 script. I had a PR 4 dating site that was receiving over 200 new members a day and I sitched my software to Dolphin 7. Most programmers just don’t have the time or ability to build a site this amazing.
My biggest concern right now is that it is still a bit slow in IE. However, I really hope this issue is resolved in the next update. Other than that, there are still a few other bugs to be fixed. Nevertheless, there is no question who now reigns supreme as the king of datinga and social networking scripts.
On one hand, I love how Dolphin is easily manageable, sleek in it’s look, runs relatively smooth (for a free web-app). However, their RMS server product is a complete nightmare. Even (if not especially) with 3rd party hosted RMS, Just trying to get a chat room that doesn’t
1. Delete your rooms at random.
2. Randomly disconnect/reconnect members/users.
3. Delete old rooms when attempting to create new ones.
4. Fail to check the web-server’s room database through the established XML.
5. Severely lag audio/video.
6. have random, intermittent, connection problems.
I’m getting fearful that I may need to use a 3rd party solution for “Chat”
Just a warning for all webmasters who want to start a social networking site using some CMS. One of them, Boonex, which is scam, have a large community around them, I was one of the first to purchase the system for $600 when it was owned by aedating. When Boonex/expertzzz took over I couldn’t get a refund for crap and scam cms. To this day Dolphin 7 is full of bugs, has crap coding, a shite template system…., the database itself gets crushed under large traffic volumes and cannot handle more than 8000 members with out crashing. I have since moved to social engine which seems really stable. Don’t waste your time and effort as there are plenty of other options out there.
Absolutley horrible. How are they getting away with selling broken software and charging money to fix it? I put this pile of php script errors and missing files on my server and they wanted to charge me $99 just to look at it and said I would be charged additional by the hour to fix it “if” anything was wrong. Complete waste of money! Google boonex scam: http://www.google.com/search?q=boonex+scam or boonex dolphin scam
Cheers
Evan
Evan, or Alex, or whatever your name is. Appreciate the feedback. There are many people who have problems with dating sites-in-a-box solutions. There are also many sites running on these platforms that are successful.
I personally have worked with developers on Boonex projects and know exactly what you’re talking about. With a solid developer, a lot of these issues can be fixes pretty easily, as you well know.
As for scam, I don’t like to hear that. I’ve meet the Boonex owners as well as the SkaDate folks. All I can say is that a generic platform system will never be perfect for everyone. But yes, useless and inefficient queries drive me nuts too (try optimizing Wordpress with a Caching system and you’ll see every page here is about 45 queries last time I checked.)
After buying a software script/platform, the next thing people need to do is hire a great developer who is intimately familiar with Boonex or whatever system they have purchase.
Not doing that is a big failure point for most companies.
I wish there were more reputable dating site developers out there, sigh.
AFAIK social engine doesn’t have a billing system in place, so it’s not a good fit for most dating sites.
OneSite is a Cadillac of social networking software. Expensive but It.Just.Works.
Tried to get a free trial version of Social Engine installed on Arvixe.com and would not even install….so much for Social Engine. Checked into Dolphin, Webscribble, and lots of other software out there for social networking. Not one is totally honest about what they offer; bottomline, you have to hire a programmer to customize what you need. Some software is cheap, but the add ons ADD UP so it’s cheaper to go with a more expensive software that has everything included. The other thing I can’t stand is this email support and no phone number. Geodesicsolutions offering classified software listed a number that was disconnected when I tried to call. Most online support is always conveniently “offline”. Another company was in Singapore and wouldn’t give me a one referral of their “over 600 USA clients”. Buyer beware.
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