Webpit.com - A Coder's Blog

I’ve had the occasion of late to use social networking software on about a dozen sites. I’ve had to hack and tweak it to get it working just right, however, that is the true beauty of open source software: that it lends itself to easy modification by the end user. The software I’ve been using is called Boonex Dolphin. It contains all the bells and whistles for free, but quite a few features are adware and payware, which I don’t like but you can’t fault them for trying to pay the bills. The software is, after all, fairly complete. It offers modules for classified ads, dating, banner management, free and paid accounts, blogs, articles, video, music and photo sharing just to name a few.

Once installed, out of the box Dolphin provides a working site. It takes a while to get under the hood to figure out how it really works. I was first frustrated by it but then began to appreciate it more and more. However, the original programmers seem to get almost to the finish line in a lot of regards but then just stop short. For example, on one of the sites I worked on, New England Pet Guide, we needed to add a bunch of articles. I imported 2k articles and went to the admin article manager, and low and behold, the software tried to list ALL 2K ARTICLES in one screen. No paging at all. Now how can you build a modern software app without thinking ahead enough to include a pager (you know, so you can view 20 records at a time, browsing a large list). Anyway, that was among many of the fixes I had to make.

So while I was making these patches and mods it occurred to me, why not publish some of these patches mods and helpful tips here so (a) I can remember them and (b) so others can benefit from them. In the next few days, weeks, I’ll be publishing my hacks and mods here for Boonex Dolphin, so stick around. Do you have any ideas for mods, hacks, or fixes for Dolphin?