Dolphin Extensions: Let's Review Them!

Hello everyone! Over the coming weeks and months, I'll be browsing through heaps of Dolphin extensions available at the Boonex Market, both free and paid-for, and writing independent reviews to highlight the best of the lot, – to help you all find solutions and make the most out of your evolving websites.

Now here's a question for you: What goes into a good review? What kinds of write-ups would you find helpful? What aspects of an extension matter the most for you? (Such as appearance, front-end features, admin features, code quality, etc.) Any thoughts and suggestions are much appreciated.

Please make some kind of mention of past buyers experience in your reviews, as the best whiz-bang module loses value very quickly if it isn't backed up by professional customer service.

Hi Markus, I just sent you a PM on this issue. 

Good points sbg101 and geek_girl, there's more to an extension than what you get when you buy it. Developers should keep their work up to date as far as possible, and especially be responsive for queries from existing customers. Developer reputation will certainly be an important criteria in choosing recommended extensions. Nobody wants headache a few months down the road after the purchase!

Hi Markus,

First of all, welcome to Boonex. I'm glad to see you want to do something about the modules in the market and maybe one of the criteria for having products for sale in the market is that you login to the site once every ...

There are currently products in the market of people that have not logged on to the site for months, if not longer. Yes, these developers and mods will most likely get bad reviews, but why let it come that far. Why not remove those products before people have to leave bad reviews?

For example; not logged on to Boonex for a month should suspend the advertisement of your modules in the market until you logon again

Finally some real interaction; not that AlexT works his ass off here and BoonEx already.

I'm glad to see this pro reaction coming from BoonEx towards the market.

I've been here three years and have much anticipated some work like this, thanks.

Thanks Denre! One half of the story is requirements that can be enforced by Boonex – and the other half is vendors being proactive about communicating their level of support to customers. Level of support is without a doubt a factor to be featured more clearly on the market in the future. Neither vendors nor buyers should have any illusions over making a once-off sale or purchase that's gonna be fine forever as it is, unless they choose to never update their Dolphin software again (bad idea).

Perhaps the level of support for a module should be indicated on the module page.

• This module is supported.
• This module has some support.
• This module has no support.

Then the customer can decided if they want to buy the module or not based on the amount of support they can expect.  Yes, I am being a bit cheeky but there are module developers that will put up a support forum and then never visit it to answer questions.

 This should be made a "sticky."

 Your request has been granted Newton27!!

Hey Markus,

Glad to see an additional hand here :) The Market really needs a big makeover for sure. Get ready to get dirty is all I got to say. I'm here for you if you need!!

 Thanks 

Makes sense, grades of support that vendors commit to. Would also make it smoother for better-supporting vendors to justify the possibly higher cost of their software (as support takes time which is money & working hours).  As far as support happening on Boonex premises (forum threads etc.), it should also be possible to set up some automated monitoring to track vendor responses and flag them for review in case their communication logs don't match the level of support promised.

Actually... a market integrated users-and-vendors support ticket system might be a good idea? Would make it easy for Boonex to (automatically) verify whether support is actually happening. Would also help make the extensions' support experience more uniform across different vendors, as the customer could send tickets to all vendors from one central place. Private messages and emails etc. may or may not be answered; but if you market your extension as supported, and then fail to respond to support requests via the official extension ticket system, it's a pretty clear-cut case there. What do you reckon?

Zarcon thanks for the welcome, for sticky-ing the topic – and for offering a helping hand! Can't have too many of those around... Looking forward chatting and collaborating with you all to make our shared Dolphin experience as streamlined and productive as possible. Good stuff happening!

Hey, when you've completed this task, would you mind writing up a review on BOONEX?  Im asking this in the spirit of hoping that maybe they will listen to you.  Maybe we would not have to beg so much for better features (ex: ORCA) or more timely updates of BUGS and/or their customers suggestions to ENHANCE dolphin.  Or maybe an even better change would happen and they will have more people (from BOONEX) helping out around on the forums instead of over working Alex (great guy).

As much as dolphin cost, i do not think that MAJORITY of the support should come from the other normal people, but I do thank the  Gods for these peoples because honestly, without them, dolphin would be very poorly supported, and a lot of customers would just simply be stuck.  In no way am I trying to bash boonex, I just would like to see a change, and more SUPPORT.  After all, boonex are developers, and when developers offers poor support for their product.......

It is true that some bugs have been floating around for years without seemingly being considered.  Personally, I am OK with the Chat room module but it does have the bug of the double posting. I don't understand why this double post bug can not be tracked down and fixed.  However, we are getting off topic here.