It is shaping up to become the biggest and the most important Dolphin version update we have ever had. In recent weeks we realised that it is so grandiose that even updates to 6 and to 7 pale in comparison. Hence, we scrapped 7.1 and we scrapped Trident in favor of Dolphin 8 - Sundance.

Dolphin 8

Current stable version of Dolphin is a 100% evolutionary product. In fact, despite a few big makeovers, it still drags a number of decade-old design choices. Some parts of Dolphin are old enough to prevent effective solutions to crucial issues and big enough to be practically irremovable. We knew this for a long, loooooong time and teased you with Trident. We had Trident in our "labs" for years, evolving and changing without going public. At the same time Dolphin evolved, became more modular, gathered a nice selection of 3rd party extensions and had a major performance improvement. You have no idea how many times we couldn't decide which way to go, working in "cross-roads" state of mind for years.

Finally, we figured our the way and there will be no further hesitation... Ideas and love invested into Trident are now being donated back to Dolphin. Sundance will become Dolphin 8 after going through "detox", "trident" and "8" update stages. In other words - we are not going to build a new house or just make up the old one - we're renovating. In a big way.

We have two main "lab" frameworks that were supposed to turn into Trident. We won't continue their development. I the nearest future we plan to release them for public review, but that's it. It's all about Dolphin now. 

Dolphin 8, once released, will power BoonEx.com.

Brief Overview

For you it's a future product, for us it's our current everyday job. We have already spent a few weeks working on Sundance with great results and although many aspects are still undecided we already feel confident about how much it is going to change everything that we know about using Dolphin.

To start off, I'll give you an idea of just a few things we're already working on:

Studio

Dolphin 8 will have no Admin Panel. Yes, you read it correctly - no admin panel. Instead we're building what we call Dolphin Studio for setting up the site, while administrative features are going to be separated a part of standard member interface with proper rights and roles. In other words - administration will turn into "super-moderation"; while technical settings, design, optimisation and whatever is needed to be done to actually change the site is left as part Dolphin Studio.

Social 

The main focus of the Sundance frontend is on social interaction. Befriending, communication, following, feeds and updates are redesigned completely. As the first step, before adding any other functionality we want to ensure that Dolphin social experience is engaging and straightforward. 

Universal

We call Dolphin universal now, because it has so many features and extensions. Sundance is designed to be universal at core. The very structure of how the site is going to be build will command an unlimited number of social applications for Dolphin software. To achieve that we're building all-new core modules - Profiles, Groups, Events, Photos, Notes and others - they are going to be completely new and with new approach in mind. New builders for pages and navigation. New, comprehensive permissions and membership-levels system. 

Detoxified

This time we're not compromising. Every bit of sub-par code is wiped out. We're taking it to bare bones and then we're cutting bad bones too. Only two senior developers (AlexT and AntonL) are appointed to work on Sundance at this stage. We want to ensure the highest quality of code and decided to limit it to senior level while core is developed. We want no dark posts this time. We want it flawless. 

Light and Fast

If current Dolphin is optimised to be fast and can be setup to be faster, Sundance is being designed to be fast and light in every sense. We're removing dependancies on Flash and Media Server wherever possible, introducing an new default template and rewriting fronted markup. Our goal is to slash Dolphin's use of server resources even before server optimisation is done.

Next Steps

Today we're uploading Sundance to BoonEx SVN. This is a development version that won't work. It's only for progress tracking and assessment of ongoing improvements. We will be announcing operational versions once they are ready. We will also run a 3-4 week pre-release collaboration program to help BoonEx Market Vendors update their extensions in advance.  

Further updates may be marked as "for Premium Members only" to keep discussion a bit more private and professional. The updates will be fairly frequent though. This post may also be turned into "Premium Only" in about a week. You can see the new Dolphin logo in our earlier post.

Sundance started the most important development marathon that we ever had. We have no certain timeframe yet, but now that we've narrowed down the goals and cleared the way it won't be too long before the old problems vanish for good. Design ideas, Trident take-aways, sketches and decisions that we already made promise a wonderful, revolutionary product.