why it never works?

This is a question I asked myself about 6 years ago in 2007 when I installed Dolphin for the first time, oh God!! on that time there were so many bugs that I lost about 6 months trying to make a website run with Dolphin and finally after so many testing and bug hunting I decided to stop using Dolphin.

Today I came back to test Dolphin again, hoping that all this years of hard work from part of the Dolphin developers team  has finally reached a really stable software, after installing Dolphin on my hosting I just had the first error, an error related with the date() function in the frontend and backend of my installation, I have to tell you, that's a really easy to fix error, but it makes me wonder: why are this little errors available to reach the stable version? are they doing it in on purpose? maybe they want us to buy support and spent more money... I don't really understand that.

I just came to the forum to have a look and I find there is a lot of people here writing about errors and more errors, why can't Dolphin be like Drupal, Joomla or Wordpress? in all this years as a web developer I really never faced any of this "silly" errors in those packages.

I just decided today that Dolphin is still not ready, if you want to sell us a license (which by the way have) at least you should be able to provide us with something that can work just out of the box with most of the servers out there, so we can spent more time developing a website that finding bugs.

Farewell my friends.

I've only seen a PHP date() message related to date.timezone not being set in php.ini, which is really a problem with the server and not Dolphin (it needs to be set anyway). Is that the message you're talking about?

Yes... and it is so easy to fix. But why can't Dolphin sort that for us? I never get those types of error when using joomla, drupal or wordpress.

Because it's not Dolphin's job to set the timezone in PHP (it doesn't offer different timezones, it uses PHP's settings). This is a problem with how PHP was configured (or not configured), it has nothing to do with Dolphin.

I appreciate your response, but I also know there are ways to sort that directly on the code instead of relying that everyone has to know (or guess) the cause of the error is on php.ini file.

My point is, you should be able to provide a piece of software that requires the minimum interference of the end user, and things like this are just very little, but if you make a sum of all of the posible errors the end user has to face because the developers decided to leave a variable for those errors to happen, it becomes very annoying.

Thank you.

Perhaps the installation routine could run a check like the Admin section Host Tools and indicate some areas that need attention before installing the platform.  Then it would be up to the user to address those areas.

However, Dolphin 7.1.x is a fairly stable platform if you give it the required resources.  I have been running a site with Dolphin for about a year and I have very few issues.  There are areas I don't like and there are areas where I have spent time changing.

Dolphin is not really a plug and play application; it is more of a developer's application.  You have to do such things as setting up the php and mysql settings and the big ones are outline in host tools.  While I might whine at times about some things, over all Dolphin is a fairly nice social framework.

Go take a look at JCow in comparison, that is at version 9 and it looks to be unfinished; it certainly is missing many of the things that Dolphin has.

Again, this is a misconfiguration of PHP. date.timezone needs to be set, or else PHP complains. Dolphin doesn't set its own timezone, so it relies on the server's PHP directive, which wasn't set for some reason. You're right that users shouldn't see that message. It means the server has not been configured thoroughly, and if this is a shared server, the host has dun goofed and needs to fix it.

Yes that one could be solved via script as the setting can be set by script but there are others that can't like dolphins memory requirements and other server requirements.

Dolphin is way bigger, and more powerful then those little tiny scripts you mentioned that run on practically any server. Dolphin has requirements that need to be met.

So lets put this another way. Technically the time zone of the server is something that is suppose to be setup and configured by the server administrator, however because most low end hosts are not setup to meet dolphins minimum requirements and the php.ini file has to be adjusted anyway, then the time zone can and should be set at that time by the server administrator as it should have been to begin with.

What dolphin should be doing instead is aborting the install when it finds the server does not meet the requirements which most low end hosts do not. Not every setting dolphin requires can be done from within the script.

Probably someone can open a ticket in trac to add this in header.inc.php and be done with this. At least it gives user an option to set timezone within dolphin itself and no upfront error.

date_default_timezone_set('Australia/Sydney');

I think that would be worse. Perfect for those in Sydney. But way off for many others.

The installer can add a additional prompt for the timezone during setup. It would not be that hard to add.

But as i stated, whats the point. Dolphin has many other requirements that can't be set at runtime by script, so the ini file has to be edited most of the time anyway.

Dolphin doesn't install if the required extensions are not present, so thats not the point. Later if resource are limited then the user will know that after installing it and running for sometime and most probably understand he/she needs to upgrade. If he really liked the product he will upgrade the server. But whats the point of scaring the user right away if he is just trying out dolphin on his shared server. He will leave the script without proper evaluation. For non technical people "Its throwing error, Its buggy" without knowing the reason or the meaning. None gonna understand that dolphin has extensive requirements before even trying it. Motto of the story, "Minimize the errors and warning if you can". Its not gonna run in free hosting anyway.

well that was meant for example.

Put an option in admin panel to change timezone if it really means that much to complicate this.

You got it, why can't Dolphin set its own time zone? it just a little variable to be included in the code, that's the thing I am asking for, you are relying the responsibility to the shared host that "for some reason" it has not been set up the time zone, but you guys know there are a lots of shared server out there with that flag in the time zone set up and you decided to leave it there (By the way I am running on a VPS hostgator hosting). I mean no offense, but you can be smarter than this and take that responsibility to make great product or you can blame the server configuration for that, that leads me to answer another thing:   

Those "tiny" script I mentioned can run in basically any server without a single error during the installation or configuration process, that is what I call a "great" script, those guys managed to make a great script and make it to run in almost any configuration, I could count with one hand the times I had ran into errors using any of those scripts.

I am just asking, why? there is a fair reason for that? are you guys feeling less capable that the developers behind those other script? I personally think you should be able to cover all the variables or at least the most annoying ones.

 It is so hard for the developers to do that? I mean, just a variable in the control panel or in the configuration file?

Those little things are what I am talking about.

Is Dolphin suppose to config mySQL as well? How about file uploads and execution times in php?  When you set Dolphin up, you will need to configure PHP and MySQL and the Webserver, etc.  Very few shared hosts are going to set up those for what Dolphin needs, which is whey there is so many Shared Hosting issues reported in the forum.  You can not expect Dolphin to configure everything that needs to be configure.  It is really a developer's framework for building social networks.  Look at the numerous permission settings that needs to be applied to the files.  Are you expecting Dolphin to do a chmod on the files during installation as well?

Geezus Valerie

/etc/php.ini

[Date]
; Defines the default timezone used by the date functions
; http://www.php.net/manual/en/datetime.configuration.php#ini.date.timezone
date.timezone = America/Chicago

You said you were on a VPS.  In the time you've spent complaining about this, you could have connected to your server, and edited this file.  I can't help but believe you are not serious about being a webmaster if you are not willing to take on even a minimal amount of responsibility.  Any webmaster has to be just a little bit self-sufficient, and this date thing is about as minor as things get.... as far as server setup is concerned.