Site now Live

markdrabble posted 17th of February 2011 in Community Voice. 2 comments.

Well my site is now live and I have users joining (mainly friends and friends of friends) but its a start!

I purchased the Membership Mod from Martinboi and it does exactly what I need. I needed a slight tweak making and Martinboi was extremely helpful and made the tweak for me. The mod integrates into payal very nicely and I have already got users paying for membershps. Some of the members has asked if they can pay via sms message, so I am busy looking into that and how their APIs can integrate into Dolphin (and I have no idea what I am doing... lol)

Another Mod I installed was Deano's Tools (a free mod) and really a must have for any site! I cannot stress enough how valuable this mod is!!

Extra Privacy by Modzzz is another free mod which enhances my site, it allows members to be able to choose what type of members are able to view their photos etc. Easy to install and works a treat.

I purchased a template from MasterThemecom (Darkshine 2 - Red) and it does add to the site look and feel. Many of the users have commented how good the site looks. The service from these guys was excellent, they installed the theme for me and even resized a couple of my graphics so they fitted on within the template theme.

This may surprise some people but I had to enlist the help of Rayz to make some slight changes to the Flash Chat app. I wanted the word (MOD) to appear after chat moderators and also a Ban Limit for users. I must say I found Rayz to be very good and cheap when it came to making these changes. There are other changes I would like making so I am busy speaking to my Moderators and drawing up a list to see if some of the changes are possible.

Some of the things I would like to appear in chat are:

System Message to appear at a (configurable) time intervals (eg the message you get when you enter the room)
Only able to be in one chat room at a time
Reorder the list of users by username or time been in the room.
When a user is banned, they receive an automated email telling them they have been banned for breaking the chat room rules.

The only bug bear about the chat at the moment is the lack of logs.... apparently since I am using RMS the chat logs are not saved into the database, so I need to find if RMS saves chat logs and if I can get access to them.

Why am I paying for Chat mods which should be as standard.... simple... I need them now! and the prices are cheap and I have had no issues in dealing with Rayz.

I would strongly recommend that before asking question in the forums, spend some time looking through them to see if you can find your answer there, you never know you may even find some useful bits of information.

If you intend to make some coding changes to your site, definitely use Firefox and Firebug. Firebug is a nice addon which show you CSS information and other bits of information about section on the page.

I am now looking to build on some of the features within Dolphin which include

using text as a watermark on images so I can put sitename/username
When a user is blocked, they are blocked from everything unlike at the moment where they are just blocked from sending messages.

So to summerise, what extra mods am I using