I had to laugh to myself when I took a look at the Boonex website earlier today. True to form, and as predicted by me many months ago. It would seem that Boonex are preparing to move on from their Dolphin 7 script and replace it with... you guessed it... Dolphin 8.

As predicted, Dolphin 8 will not share functionality with the earlier version rendering all purchased modifications, templates etc useless. Those choosing to update to the new version will be at the mercy of the vendors when it comes to updating and it is likely that many vendors will use this to force users into purchasing products again. This was certainly my experience when I upgraded from Dolphin 6 to Dolphin 7.

Another issue that I faced when I upgraded was that the URL schema was changed between D6 and D7, this was a major headache as it had a huge effect on my sites SEO rankings, and was something that was not fixable. It would not surprise me to find that Boonex will change the URL schema again on the new update.

The dolphin community are anxious with the news of the upgrade, especially those members that have been around long enough to have experienced this before. Amusingly Boonex seem to be using similar excuses about D8 being the next best thing, and so much better than the last best thing. Quite rightfully there is a lot of frustration amongst the older community members.

The same question relating to fixing the existing bugs is also being asked, and the same answer is being given that was given to Dolphin 6 users, namely that D7 will continue to be supported in parallel to D8. Well sorry Boonex. I'm going to have to call B$ on that one. I was one of those frustrated D6 users. Boonex's reply thread's title say's it all... 'Finish What We Started or Move On' I will leave it up to you to decide on what will happen there.

Interestingly, I did a Google for 'Dolphin' to see what the discussions were out in the web community, and still there, in the top search rankings are the words 'Boonex is a Scam!!'. It seems some things will never be forgotten, and the more I look at the way that Boonex operate, the harder it is to ignore such sentiments. Those newer Dolphin users should take heed to some of the bad press that Dolphin gets, there is actually some credence in those words.

Whilst I was poking around the Dolphin site I couldn't help but notice that it bared an uncanny resemblance to the old expertzzz site, it made me wonder if there had been some role changing over at the Boonex camp and they had reinstated someone from a past era. If my memory serves me correct, this would be the same person who was responsible for the bad coding of previous dolphin versions which in turn was one of the big selling points for upgrading to D7.

Ironically the same selling point is being applied to D8 - an improved codebase, with newer features, replacing the old (outdated / bad / in need of repair) codebase of D7. LOL. It seems to me (and I have stated this before) there is a severe lack of project management over at Boonex. The goal posts constantly change, and the code gets changed for no reason other than someone wants to change it. Admittedly, D7 is far from being a great piece of coding, and to be truly competitive needs a complete rewrite, but the way that they fail to manage their business is laughable. That is of course, unless such moves are part of their business strategy.

The lastest post A More Modular Dolphin. Dolphin Studio Screenshot! shows some of the groundbreaking new development thinking that has gone into D8. (LOL) But this itself has already caused some conjecture about whether it is an actual screenshot of the new code in action, or simply a created image. The answer is very telling indeed. The comment made abut D8 that Boonex could possibly a competitive product to Drupal literally made me ROFLMFAO. The biggest change is the same change that Boonex always seem to sell; a change in the base philosophy of how the web works. Well, suffice to say. Whilst Boonex try to reinvent the wheel, the rest of the web will move on at it's normal pace leaving Boonex lagging some paces behind.

Looking back, it's not too far off of a year ago that I made this post about revisiting Boonex two years from the date that I decided I'd had enough with Dolphin, it's bugs, the bad support and the lack of integrity displayed by their developers. And whilst it's pretty amusing that a year down the track it's contents are still holding true. it is of no real surprise to read the posts about D8, and how it's being handled. I still feel sorry for those sucked in by the hype, but there is some hope. Migrate to Joomla. LOL

A new blog post by Andrew Boon over at Boonex, has finally announced the upcoming release of 7.0.3. Whilst there is still no commitment to a date, it is scheduled for the beginning of August. This is great news, as for a moment it almost looked like Boonex had forgotten about Dolphin, I was almost certain that the next announcement from them was going to be the release of Trident.

It's good to see Boonex continuing to follow their promise of more regular updates, and whilst I may be very vocal over at Boonex.com about a monthly release cycle, the truth is, anything is better then the year waited for D7, especially when you consider the failure that it was bug wise. As with any of these interim releases, bugs have to be prioritised, so not everyone will get what they want, but give it time and all bugs will eventually get fixed.

It will be interesting to see what kind of balance between bugs and features there are. I personally think that the bugs should have a higher priority than features, but I guess that Boonex policy differs form this, as there are generally some new features released with every update.

New Improved Orca

Of interest to me is the promised updated Orca, I'm keen to find out what updates have been made to the code. The Blog announcement states...

...in 7.0.3 you're going to see a seriously improved Forum. We removed unnessesary AJAX effects, streamlined the UI, added moderation features and some basic forum features.

Hopefully the code should have now been updated to follow the new module format, as it's the only module that currently does not integrate into the core correctly (it is more of a tacked on bit of code than a true module).

At present my own Orca project (codenamed FRED) is on hold until the updated version is released. if there are still features missing, i will integrate the current mods into the new Orca core and continue with development.

More Free MODs

On a different note, I have decided to release the remainder of my premium mods for free. This means that the TinyMCE Browser mod is now available for download, for both D6 and D7 versions. If you have yet to try this, it's a very worthwhile MOD as it allows users to directly upload images and files for use within blog and forum posts.

With the release of my other mods a short time ago, there are now quite a few useful MODs to augment your Dolphin install. I will continue to release other modifications as I write them, generally I now release them as tutorials, as packaging them up as full mods takes up too much time.

In the pipeline...

Many of you will know that the MODs I write are generally developed for use on my own sites and then released for the benefit of all. As I still have a few things that I want to develop for my own sites, such as SEO optimisation and a mail handler to allow users accounts to send and receive eternal emails (I already have a basic test version of this running), there are still a few things in the pipeline.

The SEO MOD will take the form of an additional special 'invisible' block that can be added to any page via the page builder. This will allow extra meta data to be added to any page. Hopefully the use of this coupled with my sitemap block will help improve SEO rankings.

The Mail handler MOD allows users to utilise a This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. type email adress, by redirecting a catchall for subdomain emails to a script. This script then decodes the received emails and delivers them to the users inbox. At the moment this is very much an experimental feature that i am still evaluating. I have the code set up on one of my test sites, which works perfectly. My plans are to expand this to allow users to post photos and videos, directly to their account via email.

At this stage I am not sure whether to allow the posting of messages to external email addresses. This is a great feature if not abused, but the possibility that users can use the feature for purposes such as spam, and other less than welcome uses is something that I need to weigh up. I will keep you posted of the progress.

/DM