Installing Dolphin on Your Home or Office PC

Hi Folks,

This is a two-part tutorial which my help a few newbies.

Installing Dolphin on your home PC is actually very easy, but you can make it difficult if you want to.

The first section explains how to add a server to your PC and the second explains how to install Dolphin on the server.

Please Note: If you feel there are better ways of doing this, please write your own tutorials and start your own thread. I did not spend most of Easter writing these tutorials to hear comments like: "XXXX is a better personal server".

I honestly don't care!

Please allow this thread to run without any bickering so that newbies can get Dolphin running by following a simple tutorial which I'm sharing with you free of any cost. That's very unusual for this site, so please don't bite the hand that's trying to feed a few of you.

By all means test the tutorial and report back if you see any flaws. I've only installed Dolphin a hundred times or more during my several years playing with it and it has always worked. When I used WAMP, it was taking minutes to respond to any command. The server I recommend in my tutorial is instant and it doesn't need to be installed. it just resides in a folder which can be instantly deleted.

I've also written another tutorial which is out of sequence, but I'll add it here. It shows how to modify CSS files using the Inspect Element feature of most modern browsers.

If all goes well, I may produce another newbie tutorial on building a basic site with Profile Fields Builder and Pages Builder. It would be a follow-on from this first effort.

Great job demmy ! This will be ideal to setup a Test environment right on my PC. I never used Personal Server, is it similar to VM Server ? The one I use a lot is Oracle VM VirtualBox which allows me to create as many Linux/Putty-like sessions as I want on top of windows.. 

I think Boonex should create a section for Tutorials that are created by the community members. I myself was planning to do something for fun.. I noticed that Chat+ is using Mongodb and since I used Mongodb, I was thinking to put something together such as how to install mongodb, perform backups, and even create Sharded Cluster Database environment etc.. But not sure if anyone will be interested since Chat+ is fairly new..

Cheers,
AJ @Morocco 

Hi Morocco. I agree that there should be a Tutorials section in the forums. They have Tips and Tricks, but that not the same. I'll eventually put the tutorials up on my web site, but I don't have time at present. They will never become a book because there are large sections of Dolphin that still baffle me. Some tutorials that need to be written are on how to use various modules.

I don't think your personal server is anything like VM however I'm not familiar with that server. It's not even like VPS because you don't need stuff like Putty and you don't work on a command line basis.

Once the server is installed and running, you just enter localhost and you're in. Of course you must have something for the server to run, so you just dump PHP, HTML or whatever files into the WWW folder which is the same as htdocs or public_html. Just enter localhost/foldername and provided there's an index file in the folder it will run. My partner and I developed our entire 2.500 page ZenCart directory on a personal server years ago.

My next tutorial will be how to install your existing Dolphin site on the server for testing purposes. As I say in the tutorial, not all module scripts will run. They don't break anything, some just don't work.

Those who wasted 2 hours in the above shit, waste 5 minutes in the below shit. Below is supported for all script of the world!

1. Download AMPPS from here http://ampps.com/download , Install it.

2. Access it at http://localhost/ampps/ , Select Social Networking from left tab > then Select Dolphin > Install it.

3. Finish. Enjoy!

demmy: I liked the modified biz2 template. Can you share your final edited version with us??

I've just reported you for that disgraceful post about Ammps. Little wonder you're having so much trouble. Ampps has never successfully installed any version of Dolphin or any other script properly on my computer(s) and I doubt that 7.3 would be any different. it's designed for lazy people who tell other people they're talking garbage and then ask them for a template. What a nerve!

Ha Ha ... Then I wonder you will be the only person in the world to whom AMPPS failed to do its job!

I am using it for more than 2 years without any issue!!

Most of us really appreciate the effort you put into this, Demmy!

Thank you!

Demmy - did you add port forwarding instructions?

Professor, the setup is for a very basic server and I've never worried about port forwarding in the past. When I said you can chat by opening two accounts, I think I may be wrong there. If I recall, I may have only tested chat on the live server, but I can't be totally sure. I'm not into networking and this isn't an Internet connected server. I thought that was where port forwarding was needed. Please correct me if I'm wrong. If it's required to get some modules to work let me know and I'll adjust the tutorial, but at this stage I'm using the KISS equation.

if you plan on using this "home setup" to be accessed from the general internet - then port forwarding will need to be done - or your router will not know what to do

Professor, I have stressed all through my tutorials that for safety reasons (in the hands of newbies and the like) Internet access is disabled. This is purely a server for testing purposes. What people wish to do beyond that is something beyond the scope of my tutorials.  Thanks.

Thank You, Don't we hate trolls, I was just trolled and slammed the dude. Thanks for your time!

This is a great idea for a Intranet site. I could see using this at a company. Have a dedicated workstation turned into a dolphin server. 

Demmy,

Thank you so much for taking your own time to create this information for those who need it.  People don't realize the effort it takes to produce tutorials of any kind for that matter.  You've outdone yourself and I'm so thankful for people like you.  I really can't thank you enough.  I know what it is like to spend time day, after day, after day creating things for people to learn from.  You were not paid to do this and you did it out of the kindness of your heart.  You'll be blessed for it.  Thanks again!

MJ

I will add one thing to this.  In order to get email notifications, testing email templates, etc. you need to set up a mail server; there is a script that will spoof a mail server without actually needing to install one and it works very well.