Dolphin 7.1 Spring Cleaning

Majority of the modern-day earthlings deal with some kind of software all the time. Many have learnt that when software is updated it maybe good news and it may be bad news. Almost universal clue is the size. Whenever software is bloated with junk code, shoddy methods and superfluous data the size goes up. Whenever the software is optimised, cleaned up and streamlined the size goes down. Dolphin 7.1 is the "lean and clean" update. In many ways.

During the entire process of Dolphin 7.1 Osho development and especially during the last couple of weeks we focused on "de-cluttering". Some parts that required a good clean-up for a long time were just too... tedious to do, and were postponed for years. In 7.1 we decided to man-up and dig into all of them. Here's what we've done...

E-mail Notifications Templates

We went through all (used to be 81, now 69) of them. Checked every template, fixed texts, functionality and tested it with "live" data. Now, not only they look better and work right, but they also rock a common header and footer, which you can quickly edit to re-format all your templates in one go. 

As you may see we kept the message language to a minimum. No more "We're glad to inform you that..." blurb. Short messages will engage your users much more effectively.

Language Keys

In a bid to save a LOT of time to anyone who plans to customise their language files, or make translations, we removed 700 unused language strings. That's about 15% fat loss! 

CSS Files

Dolphin 7.1 is using a massively improved CSS styling, utilising common styles a lot more and using an improved CSS classes structure. Now, when development is concluding, we've been able to remove 66 unused CSS files!

Images

Dolphin 7.1 is using font-based icons and CSS-based layout elements instead of "old-school" pictures. Thanks to these improvements over 200 images were deleted from Dolphin 7.1.

Admin Settings

Some of you know how it takes a Dolphin-Master degree to navigate numerous admin settings and options, let alone quickly finding something specific. In our admin makeover, we went through all the settings, moved some options to their related sections (or tools, or modules), where they should have been in the first place (like, say, Anti-Spam, Cache, IP blacklist, Mass-Mailer, etc.). Some were merged, some re-organised and some were ditched for good (really, don't even worry about this). Additionally, we proofed the settings language, trying to make options names and descriptions more laconic yet meaningful. As a result, Admin Settings became much more "digestible" - compact and well-structured. In a glance... 

General

Along with all the cleaning we maintained much stricter coding requirements while working on Dolphin 7.1. Every time we'd encounter problem areas, we went on and worked on them. A few more tidying bits are planned, but generally we're confident that Dolphin 7.1 is going to be the long-awaited CLEAN version update that we're already very proud of.