Motives, Sample Sites & Online Demo

Try before your buy (or download). Dolphin is highly customisable, so demoing any specific implementation is like listening to just one song played on an instrument. Your imagination, skills and commitment will produce a unique result when you build a site based on Dolphin, but it is a great idea to get inspiration from other Dolphin-based sites, and test-drive our online demo.

Motives

Any web-community project should start with a reason. Think about what you're going to build the site for. What is the main purpose, what is the benefit and what is uniquely attractive in you future site? Dolphin is highly capable and can be used for various purposes, starting from your own interest-based blog and going all the way to building a full-fledged Facebook-clone. To help you navigate to the sample sites and extensions most applicable to your idea we have created ​Motives.

​Motives is a curation list which will serves as a cue for newcomers, offering gateways to Extensions that work well for specific kinds of online communities and listing selected samples of live Dolphin-based sites devoted to the Motive niche. Your idea may not fit any particular Motive, but you can still get some ideas from existing motives and apply them to your vision.

Samples & Demos

Along with Motives we have a simple ​Demos Page, which lists some "showcase" sites; links to Boonex-branded mobile apps and information on how to test both user and admin sides of our online demo. Online demo is always powered by the lastest stable version of Dolphin. Online demo resets automatically every 30 minutes and includes only a small amount of sample content. Thus, live sites listed in Motives may be a far more "visual" example of what Dolphin can do.

Note, that different sample sites use different mixes of activated modules, 3rd-party extensions, different templates and different language packs. Sample sites don't show what you will get - they show what you can do. Even our online demo doesn't have all the blocks activated - it would just be too much for anyone to digest. Dolphin is incredibly capable, so you need to learn its strengths and select the ones you want to use.

Design Templates

You would notice that Dolphin often looks very different on different sites. The reason is that web-masters modify the look and use different design templates. Dolphin comes with only 2 default templates (actually the second one is just a sample modification of the first), because we strongly believe that ​offering social networking software with lots of templates is a scam. You can get hundreds of temaplates from ​Boonex Market though, or your can just customise the default template via Dolphin admin panel. Our online demo is using the default template, while most sample sites use alternative templates or just modify the look extensively.