It's been my experience that when most people first get involved with Dolphin then install it and then try to install every singe modification they can find. Sometimes even ones that are floating around on these download sites and were written for 6.0.X.
Then they are confused when they post bugs here that no one else seems to have.
I can safely say that when people sign up for a social networking site they don't want to be bombarded with 200 menus, emails, notifications, pop-ups, membership options and gadgets that they don't even understand.
Yes, templates are the other headache, Dolphin isn't easy to code templates for and a lot of these that are floating around are from WAY back and people have just tried to play around with them to make them work with the latest version.
If you start off with movies, music, and photos you will avoid all these strange bugs and quirks people keep running into. Then move up to the forum and blogs. Then slow down, do your users really want a mod where they get points for which pet picture is the cutest?
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