Over 50,000 Webmasters can’t be wrong!

Dolphin is a pretty popular online community script.  It has been used to create both Social Networks, as well as Dating Networks.  Dolphin was created by BoonEx in 2001. With almost 10 years of experience, the BoonEx team have built the script through 7 versions over the years.  Dolphin version 7 is the most recent release of the social script.  It has been totally redesigned from the ground up.  Dolphin is easy to install and get up and running.

Did I Mention Dolphin is 100% Free!

One major plus with BoonEx’s Dolphin is that BoonEx offers a free version of the social script with no limitations! If you want to build a social network with no startup software costs Dolphin 7 is one of the best open source scripts availiable.  Now I’m sure your wondering Why would BoonEx build an awesome script and just give it away? The only catch with Dolphin is that BoonEx brand’s their script so that people know that you are using their software.  For some people this is fine and dandy as they don’t really care about site branding; however, if you are going to be running a professional social network in a niche market, you probably don’t want to tell the world your using BoonEx as your content management system.  Imagine how easy it would be for someone to just steal your idea and create their own BoonEx Dolphin site if you told everyone the FREE software you were using! To get around this problem, BoonEx offers licenses that allow you to remove the BoonEx branding.

Tons of Awesome Features

Dolphin was built with the most common social networking features and then some! You get the standard things such as:

• Profiles
• Browse
• Friends
• Shoutbox
• Chat
• Instant Messanger
• Polls
• Blogs
• Articles
• News
• Videos and Sounds
• Store
• Ads
• Groups
• Forums

And some things you might not expect such as an awesome mobile application for smart phones! The mobile application is also a free branded product that you can license to get your own custom branding on.

BoonEx Unity Market Place

If your looking for tons of other add-on’s for your social network, BoonEx created and hosts Unity.  Unity is a place for social network owners, and developers to meetup and discuss add-on’s that they would like to see.  Unity also consists of an online marketplace that developers can post both Free and Paid add-on’s for Dolphin! Their are currently over 500 add-on’s listed on Unity for Dolphin.  The current users and BoonEx staff review the add-on’s and post honest critiques. 

Easily Customizable and Fast!

Dolphin has really been built right with it’s latest release.  It is extemely easy to customize the layout of your social network with it’s new modular layout.  If you want to change the locations of different modules such as the shoutbox, all you need to do is drag the module around in the site designer within your administrator control panel.  If you don’t want a module on a certain page it’s as simple as just dragging it away. 

In addition to the ease of customization, BoonEx has made this software extemely fast.  The load time between pages is almost instant if you have a good webhost. Think of the speed you can move around when on Facebook and BoonEx has done a pretty good just of streamlining their code to allow for the same speed.

4 of 5 Stars

BoonEx put a lot of awesome features into Dolphin 7.  It is a great open source free script that I highly recommend.  The only down side to BoonEx is that it lacks some advanced coding features that you can find in other social networking scripts like phpFox and Social Engine.  The script is so streamlined it also cuts out the potential to add Flash content in comments or in profiles.  Their may be add-ons that will allow for this, but it should come by default.  Another issue with this script is that since it is free, popular and opensource, it has known to have issues with people trying to hack sites.  Typically these hacks don’t last long as the community and developers work quickly to patch exploits, but it is something you have to be aware of in order to grab the most up to date patches.  If the script wasn’t free and so fully functional, the hack problems from the past would have totally ruined my opinion of the script.  Dolphin 7 seems to be pretty stable and secure and I have not read any reports of exploits on this version of the script. 

Grab a free copy of Dolphin 7 by visiting BoonEx here!