Lot of comment ... lot of think out of topic.
We are speaking here about the homepage ...
My opinion is simple : what is dolphin now a day ?
- If dolphin is a meeting CMS, then let's put some splash, force people to subscribe and then put a block with online people
- if dolphin is a "facebook clone" CMS, let's put an activity feed.

Personally, I am one of the stupid with try to use dolphin as a CMS (rather than wordpress or joomla) and fight to try to get a nice homepage with the see more information i want to give to my user.
Because it's not about design, it's all about info. and for that, it's a lot of work to do ... what's about putting the picture of my last event to help people to decide to come to my next ... put a orange box for people to log themself with their facebook account, put my last video in big, etc ...
My opinion is ... let concentrate of putting dolphin content in more creative way, let's be able to design the page the way we want and to easily integrate the content we want.