Groping Along

My thanks to rhimpr for the Top 10 list in response to my last post. It was valuable advice.

I've since performed the upgrade to Dolphin 7.0.6 with no issues. The instructions for that were clear enough even for a newb.

Lacking any sort of guideline for how to go about customizing your site, I decided to tackle the profile blocks first. There were a lot of different views to customize, but I think I finally got my profiles to look like how I want them. I even managed to create a couple of predefined lists, add language keys for them, and put them into my profiles. I didn't find it to be particularly difficult, just tedious.

The search functions, however, left me puzzled. I wanted to set up different parameters for the different search options (simple, quick, advanced) and set the match weightings individually for each option. Unfortunately, the weightings seemed to be global for each block. If I changed the weight in one search option, it would change the weight in all of them. This just can't happen. I need each search option to have its own weightings because each option has completely different fields. There is no official documentation regarding search weightings and browsing the forums didn't help. Everybody seemed equally mystified by the search functionality or just flat out claimed it didn't work. That's ludicrous. Search is a key function of social sites and there have got to be many successful Dolphin-based sites out there, so why is there such a lack of good information about searches in Dolphin? I just don't get it.

I finally left fine-tuning searches for later and worked on my footer links. That wasn't intuitive. I finally found out in a forum search that the link pages were buried in the language flags. I would never have found them on my own, but I finally managed to make the changes I wanted to make to the existing links. Unfortunately, I have no idea on how to add or remove links from the footer. I guess I'll have to try to find help in the forums about that, too.

Next I want to set up all the page and navigation views to look like how I want them for the different membership levels. That looks like it's going to be very tedious as well. I just hope I don't encounter any more mysteries in trying to do it.