Competitor Evaluation

Has anyone put together a list of Dolphin competitors, with pros and cons comparisons?

There are tther CMS out ther, and some on here will tell you that they are better than Dolpin and some will tell you that they are not. There are some like SocialGo that are completely laughable....

In truth, Dolphin is a real pigging pain in the ass much of the time. You will shed tears and blood and hair... but...

My site is FAR superior to ANY of the competitors from my market sector. It looks better, works better, has more functionality than any other site in its genra. Sometimes Ilook at other sites and laugh at how rubbish they actualy are. To do this i had to invest very heavily, have a great deal of help and to make my site not look like a dolphin site as much as possible.

I will always moan about dolpin...... Its what we do.... but I love my site : )

There are a lot of options: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_social_networking_software

... including some new ones: http://www.cmscritic.com/list-of-social-network-software/

I agree with DRautenbach.  The Dolphin platform has many good qualities and many frustrating ones.  The extent you discover each of those will depend on your site expectations and web programming skills.

I kind of like what my site looks like, although I'm amazed how many useless things D comes with, and how many necessary things are from 3rd party devs, or are flat out missing altogether.

* I want quantity of photos in a member's album(s) to be based on (paid) membership level.

* I want to be able to use my existing merchant processor for memberships (I know how to create the proper form that sends the buyer to the processor, and then to handle the $_POST).

* I want to trim down the amount of activities posted by Spy.

* I want match to work.

* I haven't tackled ads yet.

* I want to make sure it is leak proof and spambot proof. I want to make sure privacy works, and that the default is for non-members to see little if anything past the main page... right now it appears that the default is non-members can see way too much.

* I want a job module that not only allows members to place and respond to service ads, but to manage the process of booking and fulfilling a service job.

FaceBook and MySpace have been around long enough that the fundamentals here should have been achieved years ago.

DRautenbach hit it square on. What it came down to for me was installing other CMS's and doing comparisons as far as built in functionality, ease of use and ability to modify or install addons. 

You'll see me complaining about Dolphin from time to time;, it can be a pain to work with but for what I need it for it has been far superior in many areas. It's not a quick and easy deployment, but it is very versatile. 

You can have all of those things and more..... if your pockets are deep enough lol... As for FB, Im sure if you had a cash injection of 500k your site would be pretty awsome too....

 RE:

 Funny..... yet neither one of those has most of what you want.  Most of the useless features in Dolphin, were someone's idea of 'Must-haves'.  It is interesting to note, that your must-have list matches my useless feature list.

What's really missing from Dolphin, are properly designed core features.

Thank you to epaulo for pointing to our list of social networking software. I wanted to point out that we've since revised that as well with some other contenders. The list includes links to reviews we've listed as well, if you find it helpful: social networking software

 OMG..... I thought I was going to wet myself... this is s funny and so VERY wrong. What did they do? Thake a payoff from the CMS owners to be favourable?

I know - facto - SocialGo has about a dozen or so widgets that totaly suck... and as for the descriptions of the other CMS on ther.... I think I will be laughing all week....   : )

For sure... it's an ad site in disguise.  The lack of critical assessments was our first clue.

And the over-use of the word "Robust".

Which does not describe anything tangible.