Walkthrough of a newbie install of dolphin and some of the idiotic things that stumped me.

First I spent a lot of time reading the boonex website trying to evaluate this product – it would have helped greatly if there was a bit more attention to giving some basic info to potential users (or even just allowing non-registered people to search the forums or questions) – by this I mean a few plain English paragraphs about the scripts functionality. For instance:

I still don’t quite know what degree of advertising Is going to appear on my pages, I have a sneaky feeling that it is only the Boonex footer, showing ads for the product itself, but I do have a sneaky feeling that at some point a casino poker add my push all of my hopefully elegant layout into an adfest. I can live with and work with the boonex ad, if that’s what it is, but I am wary of the catch.

I was almost stopped from choosing Dolphin because of the warnings about needing core access to the server – I am on a shared host, a cpanel driven thing – in fact I even tried installing once and gave up because the install process went into a spasm of warnings on the set paths screen.
It seems that you really don’t need access to php.ini – just perhaps the willingness to understand a .htaccess file.

I gave up. I erased the whole directory and was just about to instal elgg when I thought ‘what the hell’ and decided to ignore all the errors. Again I got the long list of errors above the paths table, and the tables layout was unreadable due to overlayed text.
Worst thing was that there was no ‘check’ or ‘post’ button to tell you if the new paths you’d entered were working, just the same ‘not found’ warning. I entered the paths as best I could and proceeded. And now I have a fully working installation on a shared server, whats more it is in a subdirectory and living alongside a draconian drupal multisite installation that uses several htaccess hacks. It works beautifully so far.

I wish I’d known that the way to check whether your server has the right setup was to write a simple text doc containing <?php phpinfo() ?> call it info.php put it in your desired folder and navigate a browser at it to run it – it outputs everything you could possibly wish to know.

Next I was (as have many others) stumped by the failure of Dolphin to recognise my admin user and pass. Yes I know that somewhere it says that admin tasks are kept separate from front end – but that is exactly the sort of info that escapes you when you’ve been wrestling with your server and half a dozen help pages – It is one of those little attentions to detail that make good software great. So If you find you cant log in as a user straight out of having installed the script, it is because there isn’t a user called you yet, you’ve got to log in to the ADMIN section, which is in a different directory, a subdirectory called ‘admin’. Go to the page that the install dumps you on and add /admin to the url – you will be recognised by this very different looking login form.

I spent a whole night romping through the glorious features of Dolphin and its mates Ray and Orca, and I am really made up with how good it seems – one little niggle occurred when the forums just seemed to revert to code in places where there should have been text – I made the decision to live without forums until I understood the mechanics of Dolphin and Orca better – but by chance found out that the forums need to have their language compiled before they work, simply go to admin, plugins, orca forum and click on the tiny little ‘en’ link. I am still perplexed as to why a whole suite of functionality is rendered unusable by failure to identify this obscure little link as the ‘on switch’ for the whole thing, without even a mouseover to give a clue – but who am I anyway.

I know that my next task is to mooch around Dolphin trying things out, breaking and mending things until I get some sort of concept of how all this stuff works together. Ideally there would be a few reference docs to help, some sort of map would be good, but it seems to me that the documentation is comprised of either descriptive sales statements aimed at potential customers that gloss over the mechanics of the site or fairly deep coding level resources (and a lot of boards and blogs). I might just try and figure out a way of recording my ‘map’ of how this script makes sense to me and attempt to make it available for those like me who fall half way between gloss and functions. A good instance of this is knowing what falls outside of the admin screen as far as customisation goes, what needs to be changed in a text editor or can be altered through the admin interface. Thinking about it I am still not sure how to turn a feature off, I don’t want video anywhere on this site, do I just drag the options off of the ‘page’ page, or do I need to go into the Ray folder and murder him? I wonder.

To be continued…