New Dolphin Designs Needed

brenaris posted 17th of January 2010 in Community Voice. 7 comments.

I have been around Boonex and Dolphin for close to 2 years now and I waited impatiently for Dolphin 7 to be released.  Now that it has been

released my concern now is the same design I've been looking at for 2 years...UGH!!

There are thousands and thousands of Dolphin sites out there and I for one DO NOT want my site looking like thousands of other sites in fact I don't want my site looking like any other sites.  Clearly there is an immense need for new template designs for Dolphin.

I think if designers and/or developers started creating these and put them in the marketplace to sell you would make quite a chunk of change(if they are well designed).

I do see a lot of design being done where the Dolphin designs color is changed and maybe the background behind the blocks but the key thing that needs to be replaced is the flash banners at the top of the page.

What we need is a whole redesign that is compatible with Dolphin 7

When a design is created a possible way of selling it is similar to what templatemonster.com does is have a regular and an exclusive price.

Some folks will not be able to afford the exclusive price but there are others who want and can afford an exclusive template.

In the future it would be great if Boonex could set the back end up like Wordpress where we can just upload a template and have it instantly

installed, if that happens Dolphin will be truely amazing!

My company has plans for many community sites utilizing Dolphin and we are going to be looking for unique design templates...we are talking WOW factor here...

I prefer doing business within the Unity community because basicly you get Dolphin, your passionate about Dolphin.

So I will end on this note...GET DESIGNING PEOPLE!

 
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brenaris
brenaris•17th of January 2010
 
Here are several ideas for dolphin 7 designs I would be excited to see and what would make me run for my credit card!!

http://www.templatemonster.com/swish-templates/19671.html

http://www.templatemonster.com/swish-templates/18136.html

http://www.templatemonster.com/website-templates/18406.html

http://www.templatemonster.com/website-templates/16848.html

http://www.templatemonster.com/swish-templates/16824.html

http://www.templatemonster.com/website-templates/14079.html
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mydatery
mydatery•17th of January 2010
 
1. For years D has been capable of installing templates as you mentioned in wordpress. You upload the template files, go to your Admin Panel & select the one you up (if you've uploaded it to your server), click save and amazingly it's installed. Unless of course you have tons of mods that apply to the template files and then you MUST adjust your template to match those.

2. Do what the rest of us do, if you want a truly custom look that is NOTHING like the rest of the sites out there then see more hire a designer to do it for you and place it in the contract that it is an exclusive design, hire employees and have them do it or learn to do design yourself and create it.

In the end, the templates are done in the manner they are done because of the issue with if you go to far with a mass template then the vast majority will not buy it as it will screw up their sites when they're integrated into them due to the heavy modding all of us do. As far as integrating the template goes, not sure how much simpler you want Boonex to make installing a new template than it already is. Perhaps it'd be good if they also made it upload itself, do the switching and all without you even logging in.
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brenaris
brenaris•17th of January 2010
 
Excuse me for my ignorance MyDatery on the installation of templates in Dolphin 7...the main point of my post was to encourage more development of better design templates to be sold in the marketplace.
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mydatery
mydatery•17th of January 2010
 
Excuse you for nothing brenaris, you came in posting a blog without knowing the actual informaiton and accusing Boonex of having a sub-standard platform, which it does not have. Perhaps if you took the time to actually look and learn before opening your mouth then you might avoid swallowing such a large part of your foot.
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deano92964
deano92964•17th of January 2010
 
There is a reason why most all templates appear to be mere color changes. I'll try to explain.

Dolphin has 2 features that a template like the ones you provided examples for would break.

One is the menu builders. The other is the page builders.

Most of the example templates you pointed out seem to have a different color header for each of the blocks. Now dolphin can do this, but switching block types cannot be done in just the template alone. The template will include the new block styles see more and types but the each block within dolphin would need to be told which block style to use. That is the part that cannot be controlled within the template itself.

Even the page block editor does not have the feature built in to tell each block what design box it it to use. That has to be changed manually in the database.

The same problem will most likely occur when you have a custom menu done which in many cases would render the menu builder in dolphin useless.

So any template of a completely unique design would require a complex set of install instructions for database changes and would lock the site into that one template. You would no longer be able to use the template switcher either.

So in a nutshell, templates of that type, although can be done, would render some of dolphins features unusable.

I would not design a template like that for sale. It will drastically cause a flood of support questions and even if the price was 100-200 each, the amount of support each customer would require would make it not worth it to me.

If dolphin had a better templating system, perhaps this would become a reality.

Right now, your best bet is to hire someone to do a template to meet your specs.
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brenaris
brenaris•18th of January 2010
 
Wow MyDatery you are being riDICKulous and quite nasty...I acknowledged the fact that I was not aware of template upload feature on Dolphin...I am not the person who deals with the tech side of my business...I was just basicly voicing my frustration with the lack of options for dolphin when it comes to the design side and encouraging more attempts at a better design.

Deano92964 Thanks for your reply!
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bigal0228•19th of January 2010
 
Dolphin Templates are designed around several pieces of code and default pages. With D7 there are included in the download some basic instructions on designing templates. The principle items you would be dealing with are the header and footer files (where simply adding or removing some lines of code allows you some nice flexibility in design) the Default page which generates the necessary code to create all the pages which are not hard-coded (the page designer uses these as well) and designbox.html see more templates for your blocks and finally the CSS styles. Many pahp pages also have specific coding for the page layouts as the pages are fluid (blocks can hold different information depending upon what your end user selects for display). The Index page is probably the most flexible as it is the only page using the promo block. The promo block may be removed, edited to hold almost any standard html coding you'd want, and much more. The menu can be placed just about anywhere you'd like.

As previously mentioned, you'd probably be way better off hiring someone to custom-design a template to your exact specifications so you'd have a one-off product and site. After all, I think your mention of a totally different design would be a great seller just negates your idea of having a different looking site. After all, if some tottaly new design that is so different from the "usual" designs sold like hot cakes, then wouldn't EVERYONE suddenly have the same looking design once again?
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