Bugs, Bugs, Bad Code and Bugs
Hello together.
Before I make myself unpopular please let me introduce myself:
I am 25 Years old, from germany and programmer in e-business and software-solutions...
First when I saw dolphin I was very amazed about its features and the professional look and feel it gives. Then I started testing off dolphin for a project I want to do in my FreeTime (I mean the 2-3 hours of sleep I have left each night!). Then the trouble begun...
Ok now I start off:
I am really disappointed by now about the many many bugs I experience with dolphin and in some way also with the sometimes very poor code (especially with the dublicate code, bad classes (really the usage of classes is the worst thing I have ever seen) and the attribute to use different tables for same content (like the different page-builders)).
The other point I really was interested in is the enormous usage of CSS in dolphin... CSS really is nice... but it gets kind of hard to customize the site, when theres a wild mixture of CSS, hardcoded deeply nested DIV layouts and pretty functions (like designboxcontent) which allow to quickly build up a custom designed block (actually It has to be said that it doesn't because its fixed to have the parameters 1,2 or 3 ^^).
Even worser are the updates. Since updating the site I cannot even use groups or the forum because it takes hours to load... Then I found some nice error messages where it says it cannot open the HTTP stream to the forums... HTTP STREAM.... HELLO Why the fuck does dolphin do a HTTP REQUEST to get the Forumdata from the own builtin Forums?!?!
Really I dont know what communities run on dolphin. Its pretty hard to imagine it to serve more then 50 Users at once without breaking the database or the whole server :-P
I now spent a few monts to go through the code to make improvements to the site (like having a Location-Plugin with locations, geo-database, google-maps api with route computations, location rating with different rating topics (like music, drinks, price, etc), a full widget system for all sites using PageCompose (blocks are now loaded from php-class-widgets and can directly be inserted plug-in-like) (Note: I am still upset about the freaking many tables dolphin uses for each and every pageCompose just to store the same freaking data). And now I'm a little tired about it... And I am not sure if its worth it to keep that up.
Well ok lets come back to the CSS... I had the problem of content disappearing in IE6/7 for the whole page... Then I noticed that almost each and every style regarding div-elements has a position:relative in it... Really good... actually did you know that IE opens a new layer for each position:relative/position:absolute you call on a div? Thats very ressourceeffective!
Ok before you really hate me... I have to say the Idea of dolphin and the features are really great. I really like it... But for the months of programming I put into it now I'm a really frustrated with all the issues I had because of bad programming or senseless 'innovations'...
I'm sorry If someone feels offended by this post, don't want to offend anyone (acutally I feel offended to see that someone wants money for such an unstable product)...
The new Dolphin solution is powered by UNA Community Management System.
Having said that .... this is open source software for you. Welcome to world of many different people developing different things and more or less nailing, glueing and duct-taping it together.
Being a webmaster myself I am a complete PHP-idiot (most of it sounds like Vulcan to me). My terrain is lay-out, content see more
1. Where is a better professional script that you have written. I would like to try it.
This sctipt has it's bugs, but it gave me an oportunity to make a great site and i love it.
I will endure the growing pains so that when it matures, which it will, i will be proud to say, "I grew up with it and it grew up with me"
That is me few pennies "And that's all I have to say about that" see more
Actually the best is to stay with your code once you've cleaned everything and not try to integrate anything new coming from "boonex", else you can expect bad side-effects and new bugs.
By the way, especially getting rid of all the Ray stuff is probably one of the first priorities.
Things to be found on http://modmysite.com/
Regards
So if you thing you can do it better than boonex, why don't do it and let all of as to criticize what you are doing.
From the other hand, nobody make you "follow" this scripts. Out there in the net, there are so many scripts, i am sure you will find something realy good for you!