1. Navigation and Structure: This is looking much better than before with all the different domain names to try and keep track of. Please see the following

I made another post on the importance of well documented standards so that developers can develop mods and still stay in alignment with future upgrades. As we can see by everyone’s comments that many of you are concerned about how to upgrade and be able to maintain your mods as I am as well.

Microsoft and many other software apps would see more be in big trouble if there was no way to upgrade without losing all your custom mods or apps. Now I realize no software is capable of sustain and upgrade and completely 100% for anything somebody else creates. But by creating a clear and easy framework to work within can avoid many of the challenges upgrades present to third-party mods.

I cannot stress enough the importance of the future of this community to succeed as a team the importance to devising a set of standards that are clearly communicated so that many developers can work on the development of mods for Dolphin.
Here you can see this product we also work with that is a world class CMS and they have a great developers section that empowers developers to develop third party apps they refer to as extensions. http://dev.joomla.org/ Because they have went the extra mile to clearly communicate interworking of the Joomla’s core that in return aids web entrepreneurs and developers to develop even more extensions to make the core even more flexible. http://extensions.joomla.org/
So I say look at what some of the other successful open source groups are doing and try a mimic their successes as much as possible. The Alexa growth and success says a lot about how much attention the community is paying attention to Joomla http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/joomla.org

I personally like Joomla especially the latest 1.5 version. It’s easy to use and there are tons of extensions available to address just about any kind of need you want.

The closest extension however they have that makes Joomla act somewhat like is a product called Community Builder. Still way behind the curve compared to Dolphin. Also there is no such thing as Ray. So Joomla while I like what they have done with their community involvement of third party modules and developers they have a lot of catching up to do before they will even be close to what Dolphin does.

However, I think we need to be looking at what they are doing right. Clearly the Alexa rankings indicate its hot and doing something right. And I think what they are doing better right now than Boonex products and please take this only as constructive criticism and don’t smack me to hard because I like you guys and love your work so far. Anyway they are communicating better on all levels. Plain and simple. Because they are doing a better job at doing this I think you are seeing a lot of professionals get involved in making the product even better.

It’s very hard to want to make something better if you’re not sure how well everyone is collaborating together and if your efforts are really going to be utilized for the good of all.

Notice how they have the core team outlined here and they are not Joomla employees http://www.joomla.org/content/blogcategory/43/85/ http://www.joomla.org/content/blogcategory/42/87/
As a business man trying to make desions about what product you should go forward with these kinds of things are very important. It’s great that you Boonex has a bunch of sites that are up and running and working great but exactly how do we as web entrepreneurs add our own individuality to the Dolphin core and still stay on track with the rest of the folks.

In my opinion one of two things will happen without proper guidance here:

a. Many web entrepreneurs will move on and find another product they can use and then build it out from there making it their own.
b. Or they will use the Boonex core in its current state build it out from there like in example one but because their product begins to take a completely different path because of custom mods they then become trapped with a legacy version and are also never able to continue to contribute back to the community. And by the way that only add more work on the core Boonex team.

When I look at http://www.boonex.com/trac/dolphin/wiki/DolphinDocs I see a lot of incomplete or documents that are just not up to date and a lot of support questions could be eliminated if someone on the core team was dedicated to making sure this is not the case. While there is a great timeline and roadmap here where is the documentation that would aid a developer I would hire to build a compatible plug-in or third-party mod.
Just some thoughts and please do not miss read this I love all the hard work everyone has done and is doing I am only trying to give some feedback to help make it better.

2. Buyer and Seller Protection. There needs to be at minimum a rating system for developers of mods, templates ect. See http://www.rentacoder.com we deal with this site a lot for coding projects because they have a system similar to Ebay that rates and protects both buyers and coders.

3. Agreed!

4. Support Via Forums: I know some of you guys are going to kill me when I say this but the forums are a cluster fu_K. To much information with old info mixed all together and its just hard to make heads or tails out of anything. Proper support needs to be put in place and NOT charged for unless its advance support. Please see my notes in item one about how Joomla does this. Developers, you can still make money for doing Mods and advance support if this is done correctly. Many Joomla developers create products that just easily install into the core and make a successful living designing and selling these products.

5. Please see most of my comments about in 1.

Ok guys I don’t want to be blunt but this is the Turning point where we are now when a small company or group needs to scale and they either fall on their face because they can’t or they grow up and act like a bigger fish. It’s called growing pains. Some make it through this and others don’t. The path you choose will determine the outcome.
I am very happy to see that your soliciting suggestions as this is a step in the right direction. Synergy is what is going to be key for future of this project and the way you’re going to get that is better structure and better communications.
With communities becoming the in thing right now on the web these products have a change to make reach out to every new idea out there imaginable. However, there are going to need to be some improvements in order make that possible.
As a business guy I can tell you that speed to market is absolute key many times to success and we cannot have working with just this small group here alone as it will become overwhelming for them as well as a bottle neck to us our here. Please take serious though to some of the things I wrote in number one.
Great work guys but it’s time to keep pushing beyond the envelope. Polish it and make it shine baby……!

Zorro………………………….