Newcomer and Dolphin evaluation

Hi,

I have just joined BoonEx forum and what to say Hi to everybody. I also want to apologize for I understand the new members ask most silly and stupid questions so please bare with me. I also do not understand well Dolphin concepts and terminology so please forgive me.

My first question is what is the best place in the forum for newcomers to post questions? I want to see if Dolphin can help me set up the web site with features we would like to have. I understand that Dolphin has extensive capabilities,  and it will take some time to master, but before I dedicate myself to do that, I would like to see if Dolphin can do what we wold like to do.

If this is not a right place to ask this question I apologize and please suggest where wold be right place to do that.

Since describing the web may be too much for one post please feel free to advice me how to proceed. In a nutshell we want to set up a social media web site for a private club. There will be only joining by invitation at lest at the begging. We would have four types of member at the bigging.

Council member,
Manager member,
Paid Member,
Affiliate member

Each one of member type need to have chat, forum, groups and messaging. I must say that I an not sure if this concepts mean to me exactly the same as they are in Dolphin, but I will clarify as we go. Council is the highest level and most privileged. A council can access chat, forum, groups and messaging of councils, managers, members and affiliates. A Manager can access chat, forum, groups and messaging of managers, members and affiliates. A member can access chat, forum, groups and messaging of  members and affiliates. And an affiliate can access chat, forum, groups and messaging of affiliates.

Council, manager and member have monthly fees which need to be charged every month. If payment fails ,one will be downgraded to an affiliates until dues are paid, in which case they will be restored back to their original level.

This is in a nut shell, so I would welcome any feedback can this be done in Dolphin and how hard would be to do that. I have done some programming in php but I would not consider myself an expert.

Thank you very much,
David

Just my basic thoughts:

Dolphin is essentially a social networking site and out of the box it does a good job at that. To make it something else such as a membership site, you will probably find yourself chasing third party modules which may or may not do what you want. My guess is they won't do exactly what you want, but I stand corrected.

The standard Dolphin does allow you to create different membership levels, but the purpose is to offer more or less features to a member rather than accessing the same feature in  different ways. For example a full member can use Groups, but an promotional member can't. 

Admin can create groups and limit their access to Members or Friends. Modzzz has a module that allows you to create additional privacy levels and that may get you over the first hurdle. You could then create different groups for different privacy levels.

There's a variety of membership modules, but I'm not sure if they will do what you want. I use Promotional and Standard and when a standard membership expires, it makes the person promotional again. As I don't use memberships the way they're meant to be used, I can't comment further. Once again you could discuss all or some of this with Modzzz or AntonLV. 

In his resume, Modzzz says he does a limited amount of coding, whereas AntonLV does a lot. He's quick and not expensive. I'd be talking to both, or considering an independent coder to take you under his wing. Because Antonlv knows Dolphin backwards, he can usually give you a price before kicking off.

Thank you johnk42, is there place where I can read about chat, forums, groups and other Dolphin concept to I can understand what do they mean, what purpose and functionality they have?

Without having a real time discussion you might can achieve this using profile type splitter and membership type splitter from the market.  With those, you can better control viewing of profiles searches, etc.  Even then, you might need to do some custom coding to control the messaging.

I do custom work if you are interesting in hiring me to get your project up and running.  Just send me a PM.

@ASAP the tutorials and documentation for Dolphin is a bit of a train wreck. There's no place I can point you to that will give you the information you probably need to know, which is very sad for most of us.

I suggest you go to the Dolphin Demo at http://demo.boonex.com/ and sign on as administrator. You can add, edit delete stuff, but the site resets every 20 minutes or so. This won't tell you everything because the demo only uses modules supplied with the product.

Once you get a feel, you could then head off to the third party module site https://www.boonex.com/market/ and look at the offerings there. You'll find two main players: AntonLV and Modzzz. Look at all their offerings and wander off to their demo sites if something looks interesting.

It's the privileges and accounting that worry me.

Dolphin's membership privileges allow different membership levels to see  different things, for example:

Promotional can view forum posts
Standard can make 5 forum posts a day

Gold can make unlimited posts

Dolphin's privacy levels allow members to create forums for different privacy groups:

Members - allows all members to access a forum which may be "Football  Talk"

Friends - means a member can create a forum only his friends can read. This may be Jill's "Trip"

Modzzz Privacy Level module allows you to make additional privacy groups, but you would need to ask him if you can select multiple groups. If you can, this may really help you achieve what you want.

As @Geekgirl pointed out, the same may not apply to some modules such as Chat and this may require custom work.

I don't use payments so I have no idea if the payment module(s) available will do what you want.

There's a mob called TidyHQ https://tidyhq.com who run a semi social networking site especially for clubs. They charge per member and they don't have some modules you may want. On the other hand, their accounting system is good. If you like what you see, ask as many questions as you can before signing up.