New Dolphin 7 Tutorials

First off - let me apologize for my long absence from blogging. I am currently working a project in China. What I thought was impossible, to get to blogger.com from China - appears to have been fixed with a simple VPN service.

Down to the nitty - Dolphin 7.04 was recently released. This release gave us a new feature. A much-needed SPAM attacker for our Dolphin communities. Once again - Congrats Boonex on a job well done. Better late then never they say!

I have posted a couple of new tutorials over at youtube -

• A tutorial on the installation of Dolphin 7.04
• Installing Modules in Dolphin 7.04
• Installing and Configuring Facebook Connect in your Dolphin web site.

I enjoy getting your comments and requests for new tutorials - keep them coming!

In my How To Install Dolphin Community tutorial, I mention a site I came across called earningportal.com - This site has a focus on helping it's members build their community web sites. They have Joomla, Wordpress etc - but my focus (as you know) is the Dolphin community builder.

My point: If you are having a hard time signing up new members: Check out the resources these guys offer. Build your membership list and find new members for your Dolphin website, using the tools and resources offered there.

You do have to sign up (it's free) to see most of their tools. Not sure why they do it that way - but, it's free to join - so what's the big deal right?

They have a few video tutorials that I picked up as giveaway's for my clients. From what I hear (I didn't have time to actually view the tutorials myself) they were a great help in building traffic to my client's Dolphin web site.

I wanted to touch on something that I get a tonne of questions about:

"How do I generate traffic to my web site" - This is the million-dollar question isn't it. I'll be honest with you - I don't personally run a Dolphin web site, or any other membership-based community. I do have a few hundred clients that run these types of sites and they all have their own methods of getting traffic and finding new members.

I will say, I have heard from at least five of my clients that they use the same tool - as much as I get asked, I am always asking around. Especially from those web masters who have built a good membership list for their site. The most common tool I have heard actually works to generate traffic and sign ups - is an automatic traffic generator - Like I said, I don't use it myself, I don't really have any sites I want to generate traffic to. If you think about it though, if 5 clients are all using the same tool - it must work.. I will leave it to your own research... but hey... let me know what your results are. Does it generate new sign ups? How many? How long did it take to set up and use?

For the record, and for those friends that read my blog - China sucks! Other than the development team I work with are great - altho the language thing gets to me some times. It takes three-times as much effort to explain a function or script than it did with any team I ran in Canada!

Chinese food - sick to death of it! I would kill for a roast beef dinner, with all the fixin's -- but enough whining. I am enjoying my assignment and the little travelling I have done in China - would not trade the experience for anything.. so all whining aside.. I am glad I took the contract -- to those that helped talk me into it -- you owe me a burger and fries, and I owe you a BIG thanks.. This has been a great experience already and I still have 18 months to go...

Now that I have the VPN service, I will get back to blogging and creating new tutorials for Dolphin and other CMS systems, as time allows.

Take care all and have some chinese-food thinking of me!

Dolphin 7 Final Released

Yes, Dolphin 7 final is available to download.

Should you install it on your live site and rush to be one of the first with all those cool new community features?

I wanted to make my thoughts clear with regard to using Dolphin 7 on a live site.

The first 'final' revision of any software will still have bugs.

Just because Boonex says its the final release does not mean there wont be problems with it. As with all of their previous Dolphin versions, it took a few months to really get their final version working perfectly. By then there were several patches available.

I am sure the same will be true of Dolphin 7 - there will be bugs and depending on the level of customization in the areas where Boonex releases a patch, it could increase the time to upgrade to the various patches.

Starting with D7 is both a good and bad idea - there may be some features of D7 that have a bug. You can disable that feature until a patch is made available.

But.. that means you go live without a feature or with a feature that may or may not cause a problem.

Some webmasters would argue the point to go with the proven version (6.16) on a live site and wait for at least the first major upgrade (Dolphin v7.1) before using it on a live site.

The call is completely yours, and you will get both sides of the argument where ever you turn.

If your site will have many many customizations, it might be worthwhile to go with Dolphin 7 and just release features that are proven bug-free. Building your site functions (and user tools) slower than we could with version 6.16

Starting with D6 and thinking that the developer can simply port those features to D7 is not entirely the case. We will of course build with the awareness of going to D7 within the code, but there will be additional hours of development to recreate the integration of custom code with the Dolphin 7 system.

There are pros and cons to both options.

The version to start with is entirely up to you. Developers are simply here to lay out the options, explain the pros and cons and take your direction.

If you'd like to discuss your upgrade to Dolphin 7 or start your own membership site using the leading community site builder - feel free to check out www.thedanielsolution.com A leading Community Site Builder on the Dolphin platform