Dolphin Social Network PHP Platform

Social Media Networks are the last trend of Internet as proof Problogger has just posted today (March 15th) "Social media sites have exploded onto the online publishing scene over the last couple of years"

MySpace, Facebook, Hubpages are of course greats examples of such social media networks. Maybe you want to build one on your own ? Then you'd better find your very niche because competition is now very harsh. We won't discuss more the business model as we only focus on software aspect.

There are several social network php scripts on the market but the only one I know that is free and filled with a bunch of features (including rare feature such as multi-lingual support) is Dolphin Social Network PHP Script from Boonex, that is why I am presenting it here. More precisely if you don't pay the licence, you must keep a link to Boonex site which is kind of fair deal, isn't it ?

The problem with Dolphin Social Network PHP Script is the strong technical requirements for webhosting service (see the list below) not well supported by most shared hosting services for security reasons. So that they advise only one exclusive webhosting for the install success which I think is a major drawback: I don't want to be tied personnaly to one single firm for my site. If I need to move it elsewhere I'd like to know I could.

Dolphin requires the following pre-requisites for your server:

• Linux/Unix (Red Hat, Debian, FreeBSD, Mandrake, etc.) or Windows OS, Apache Web Server

• Ability to run executable files (necessary for ffmpeg.exe)

• root SSH access (necessary for RMS installation)

• PHP 4.3.6 and higher (safe_mode must be Off, exec() must be allowed and allow_url_fopen also must be On) with mbstring, domxml and xsl extensions (they are required to run Orca forum and support UTF-8)

• MySQL 4.1.2 and higher

• GD library compiled with TrueType fonts (for photo processing) or ImageMagick as an alternative

• Sendmail or Postfix

• shell or another interface for setting Cron Jobs

• 20MB of disk space and 1MB of MySQL DB space for installation

• 8MB of disk space and 50KB of MySQL DB space for an average user

Otherwise you will not be able to install and operate Dolphin properly.