Dolphin Evolution and Some Details on 7.1

While Dolphin 7.0.5 is to be outed any day now, I'd like to shed some light on what is going to happen afterwards. We like to think that one of the most important qualities of BoonEx is that we are not developing for money. I mean, we still need some dough (is it still Ok to say so, or am I stuck in the Catcher in The Rye mode?), but it's not the primary motive. To spur the turnover we could just add a couple of fancy social networking or dating templates; convert to a paid-only software model; promise eternally wondrous support and open pockets wide enough.

Not cool.

We now have a unique opportunity to actually think on what's best for a real social site, what makes ideas click and where to direct our development efforts. We took a long brake from adding any significant features and produced a line of service updates to make Dolphin fast and stable. Now the time has come to reevaluate, pull Dolphin out of the box (pond?) and furnish the world with something a little more exciting than yet another Jack-of-all-trades-CMS.

Here's what we have in mind...

Dolphin is (to be) "effortlessly social"

Consider some of today's super-star "social services"... Twitter, Foursquare, Groupon, Quora, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Flickr, YouTube and even Facebook. All of them largely rely on a handful of core features that enable main use-cases. 2-3 use-cases at a maximum. Everything else is a blurb build around them, and is often unnecessary, if not damaging.

It takes sticking to only one good idea to become a hit.

Dolphin, as it is now, fits this tenet neatly - turn on a module of your choice, modify it, launch. Not everyone does that, unfortunately. Most admins enthusiastically activate all Dolphin modules and wait, just like fishermen with a bunch of rods. This approach doesn't work in 2011, not with the pampered fish we are dealing with, anyway. We need good nets and good bait.

We've got to get it together

You bring the wine, we'll bring the weather

So, the bait (idea) is your part, and the net (social engagement tools) are our concern. What are they? Now that is exactly what we are going to identify and focus on in Dolphin 7.1 and further on. Looking back at those "super-stars" we can tell that flashy (pun-intended) features, like 3D-chats, virtual worlds, video-conferencing, etc. don't matter that much. The most important ingredient, it seems, is a clear way of "connecting" with new or existing social graphs and seamless content sharing within them. Befriending procedures, notifications and friend's feed are on the table as the most important revisions. All existing CMSs have those functions added as an afterthough, a diminutive set of "must-have" buttons thrown-in to feed the feature-hungry crowd. "That ain't right". Dolphin 7.1 is going to fix that wrong.

Dolphin is fast, but needs to be faster!

It's nothing short of amazing how increased internet connection speeds work against slow-loading sites. Top performers shape users' expectations and we need to keep up. Page loading should be instantaneous. Not just "pretty damn quick", but absolutely immediate. hence further fat reduction surgeries are warranted. We want to see you blown-away with Dolphin speed.

Dolphin has to look and feel lighter

Flexibility of default template look-and-feel modification and overall "fitness" requirements finally made us redesign Dolphin's default template. We already have some mock-ups and plan to share some screens with Premium Members shortly (this needs to be kept a little more "private" for a while). Basically, we tried to remove unnecessary images and construct a layout that'd be easier to tailor for different backgrounds and color schemes.

But what about that super-cool and uber-important feature...?

Oh, how we love them bells and whistles - BoonEx devs beg for a "something new" assignment routinely, commenters bestow world-changing ideas upon us every day and quick addition of some magic social plugin promises smashing triumph...

p.s. Is dream within a dream possible?

or, in other words, do we have any news on Dolphin 8 / Trident? We do, actually. Despite "Dreams within dreams is too unstable!" adage we have made some serious advancements and plan to discuss them later this week via for-Premium-only blog posts.