Dolphin 7 Beta - Initial Observations

After seeing the announcement last night about the impending FF beta release, I eagerly waited until about 1 am to see if it would appear, and then decided I needed some sleep as I had to catch the redeye in the morning.

Fortunately when I powered up the macbook in the Qantas lounge - there it was - waiting eargerly to be downloaded. I downloaded it thinking that I would install it this evening after work.

Well, eagerness got the better of me, and I just wasn't getting into my book on the plane, so I cracked out the laptop and installed it.

First impressions are WOW. It appears that all of the complaints about installation have been taken on board, permissions were correctly set in supplied files, so no messing around with that headache. (unless the checking is simply now turned off) in fact the only thing I had to change was my php path - and I can forgive your for that (even though it's easy to find programatically).

The quick install gave me plenty of time to check out the new admin interface (I didnt bother with the previous beta as I couldn't be bothered to set the required file permissions) and for the most part I like it, but there are a few 'bugs' for want of a better term.

My first 'bug' is that there needs to be continuity wth the terms 'extensions' and 'modules' - they both refer to the same thing - please choose one.

I lke the fact that the extensions are not all installed by default - this allows a greater freedom in customising - however - there does not appear to be any warnings for dependencies - some extensions appear to rely on others.

Next 'bug' is that I could not see a way to manually add members (bit annoying for testing).

Another thing that I noticed, is that some of the admin menu blocks on the left, collapsed when selecting the menu items, this made navigating through the options a bit of a pain.

Additionally most / all of the editing areas within the admin panel were reduced to a very narrow width in the centre of the page - this applied to text areas, textfields, option boxes, etc.

There were some areas not working in my installation - namely the pages builder, additionally the members menu blocks were misaligned (looked like an absolute / relative CSS positioning error)

I noticed that there did not appear to be an admin link on the site when logged in as admin - is this intentional or am I simply missing it?

Anyhows - all very minor issues in the grand scheme of things, so it is a credit to all at Boonex.

I've not really delved too deep into the whole site and it's functionlity, but I really like the presentation, there is a good attention to detail - it's the small things like the avatar and post details in the shoutbox, and the navigation bar at the bottom which make the whole experience a lot better. I'm still not 100% on the main tabbed navigation bar and the narrow tabs at the ends - this is a break from tradition and I'm not sure it really works for me (yeah yeah - I know it's just a template). I have noticed that Orca still seems pretty basic, and that the groups extension does not work (it shows as installed but there is no link / admin settings for it).

Overall it's looking good, keep up the good work.

DM.