I was on the phone today with a client who had an older version of aeWebworks (now called Boonex) dating software, which is now called Dolphin. I went over to Boonex and checked out the live demo and thought, what the heck, lets’ see how difficult it is to install.
Disclaimer: Now before people get all worked up, remember, this is an unscientific undertaking and I am not an IT guru, although I am quite familiar with blog software. Nobody paid me to write about this, I was simply curious, as the Boonex posts here get tons of comments from people either very happy with the software, or totally pissed off at the lack of custmer support. I got some grief today about an affiliate link to Webscribble, another popular dating-site-in-a-box. I had forgotten all about that link. Long time readers will also notice the ads in the sidebar. The ads are affiliate links, mostly for clients. They exist for several reasons, I am curious about which get the most clicks, and they provide me with beer money. Maybe sometime I’ll set up sites with other systems, it’s not on my radar at present. End disclaimer.
Initial setup was a breeze, nothing to it. I immediately digressed into reading manual pages of unix commands, which probably doubled the setup time. I could have done everything from my FTP client but sometimes you just like to fire up the command line and get under the hood and I like to exercise my inner sysadmin from time to time.
Step 1: download software
Step 2: upload to web host
Step 3: create database.
Step 4: fiddle with file permissions,
Step 5: log into new dating site.
Time spent: 42 minutes.
Time customizing theme and getting ready for real traffic: Unknown. I couldn’t figure out how to tweak the CSS that drives the themes from within the admin interface, which led me to the Expertzzz forums and Wiki, which worked for a few minutes, then promptly broke:
Cannot complete query (query):
DELETE FROM `boon_sessions` WHERE `time` < 1174515947
Incorrect key file for table ‘boon_sessions’; try to repair it
Oops. Talk about bad timing. If they can’t get links to the support database working, what other problems are lurking just around the corner?
Notes from the install process
Make sure your host has all of the necessary programs and features to run Dolphin. If they don’t, you’re out of luck. It appears that a lot of people b0rk the initial install because they are not paying attention, and then complain loudly in the forums. This is not the case for all install-related issues though.
Read the Dolphin Wiki to get started and have the forum in another browser tab for easy reference.
Permissions instructions are not clear and need to be redone. For latest version 5.6, told to change permissions on directories that don’t exist.
They need to add an alert to change default password. Hint, it’s under Global settings menu.
this should show up in control panel at first login.
Dive into Global Settings menu:view all. Review and make changes. Pretty straightforward.
Fix: “Bread cramp divider” should be “bread crumb” in main Admin panel. There are a lot of spllelling mitsakes in the documentation and administration interface. This can make certain tasks challenging, but not as much as the lack of links to help and documentation from within the admin interface. That’s just plain lazy on the part of Boonex. They don’t understand that the more help you give people right in the page they are working on, the less cluttered their support forums will be with newbie questions.
Some of the admin settings are real head-scratchers and you end up burning a lot of time trying to figure out what certain terms mean.
CSS templates are not writable by default, so you have to manually change permissions, but that info is not readily available. A system that makes it difficult to apply your design to it’s templates is not fun. Witholding judgement until I can read the manual.
Sumitting an event for the event listing page did not go well. After clearing all the errors pop-ups, I submit the event, page reloads back to main manage events page with error:
Wrong date format for wrong
What does that mean? Back to the forums to figure it out, wait, they are broken, so I’m spinning my wheels trying to get the event posted. Why are events listed down to the second? Not all events require tickets or max # of people. Didn’t like my initial password. Decide to move on and add some news items into various custom categories, which goes smoothly.
When I created my profile, the link from confirmation email didn’t work.
Height is in ranges, should be inches or cm.
No default IM? Need to upgrade? Over to Userplane (advertiser on this blog). Will integrate that later. Userplane still references Boonex as AE Webworks, need to change the email templates.
Adding new questions to profile. This is super important for any dating site, and was problematic for me. Changing the search type of the new question refreshes the page and your new question is not saved. No clear description of search type, match type or match field. What does all that mean? Where is the link to the description of these fields?
Orca Forum. Never loaded, the cool new AJAX features are broken, kept trying to reload the page. Perhaps it was because I was using Safari on Mac to load the live site. Maybe it’s great, who knows. I prefer phpBB.
New questions, rearranging modules and theming are probably the most important to new dating site owners, or people moving over from another platform. I may add more to this later when I embed Userplane and tweak the CSS.
So far so good, not bad for a few hours work, but a long way to go to make it look unique and get all functionality rolling the way I want it to.
ModMySite is an active forum for Dolphin administrators.
That’s as far as I got, go check it out.
Still here? Type Boonex or aewebworks in the search box here and see what comes up. Lot’s more insight from people with a lot more experience than me with Dolphin.
