Dolphin for a blog site that will progressively add community features

Hi,

I'm in the experimental phase of using Dolphin in replacement of Drupal and I'd like to save myself some time digging through the tool by asking you two questions on one simple use case :

The use-case :

We'll take the case of a site which mainly has chronological content like a blog with categorized articles, features, some videos, links and whatever you can find on any publication or blog on the net.

The site first focuses on content and discussion around it but will evolve as a community of interest with social networking features being added progressively.

I just don't want to confuse people and keep the focus on content in a first phase then push the community features once the community is actually built, thanks to he content of the site.

The questions :

- Is Dolphin by itself, without adding any major plug-ins, good enough for a publication with stories, authors and categorized content management ?

- Is it easily possible to hide its social networking features in a first phase (except membership and article comments) and then progressively make them appear ?

You'll save me (and maybe other people) a lot of time if one of you who knows the tool very well could answer those two questions.

Thank you in advance.

Alexandros

- Is Dolphin by itself, without adding any major plug-ins, good enough for a publication with stories, authors and categorized content management ?

Yes.  Dolphin has its own blog, article, news and member standard modules.  There are many mods available that extend these capabilities, but Dolphin does have the ability to handle your needs "out of the box".

- Is it easily possible to hide its social networking features in a first phase (except membership and article comments) and then progressively make them appear ?

Yes.  It is possible to enable/disable any module or section you wish. Then, using the page builder and page access tool, you give access to different member levels as you wish.  Member levels have some predefined types but you can also make new member levels, assigning them access accordingly.

Please let me know if there are any other questions you have.

Regards,

Bob

Hey Bob,

Thanks for your reply.

I've got an Enterprise pack bought during the sale late last year and as I'm digging through Dolphin and have my questions answered I'm feeling more and more excited about actually using it.

Any idea if there's any migration tool from Drupal to Dolphin for users and content ?

I'm also looking to have single login between Drupal and Dolphin because one of the projects I'm planning to migrate is a multi-site community.

Thanks,

Alexandros

Honestly Alexandros, I do not know of a tool that will specifically export drupal tables and import them into boonex correctly.

The last job I did, www.thinbluelink.com , had that same type of situation.  It took us 5 days to map and export correctly everything from a "proprietary" database and import it into a Dolphin 7 installation.  We learned a great deal from this exercise actually.  Learning to take all of the required information, messages, blogs, groups, members, etc from a proprietary system into Boonex was very challenging.

If you are looking to do this type of work, my team and I are very interested.  After working on thinbluelink and nannyaupair we have chosen to drop Wordpress and to focus on Boonex completely.

Please let me know if there is anything we can do for you.

Regards,

Bob

 databases are not my specialty but if I understand your question, this tool may help - has free trial version also http://www.sersoftware.com/prod/data-moving-tool/usage/data-migration.php

this one is new to me, never tried it, but used something similar 10 years ago that was an add-on to ACT 2000 software and it saved me lotsa $