phpDolphin Review

phpDolphin is a standalone php script, a social network platform which is similar to Facebook. Basically, it allows members to interact with each other by live chatting, sending messages, comments, likes, and sharing photos, events and etc, you can think of it as a Facebook clone with some of the basic features. Regular license costs $43 and comes with 6 months standard support. With over 2000 licenses sold, this is definitely a piece of quality product. It is just that for a script this complicated, I kinda expected that the documentation could be a bit more comprehensive. Nonetheless, it is a 5 star script and worth every penny. As long as you have basic php knowledge, you can edit the script to your liking. When you set up your phpDolphin, here are a few things you might want to know:

social-network-script

SMTP Error – When you registered test users, did you receive bounced emails in your notification mailbox? Something like this “SMTP error from remote mail server after end of data:”, “554 5.7.9 Message not accepted for policy reasons. See https://help.yahoo.com/kb/postmaster/SLN7253.html” or “550-5.7.1 Unauthenticated email from yahoo.com is not accepted due to domain’s DMARC policy. Please contact administrator of yahoo.com domain if this was a legitimate mail. Please visit https://support.google.com/mail/answer/2451690 to learn about DMARC initiative. c7si10114760qgc.109 – gsmtp” Make sure that in the file includes\config.php, you are using a correct email for your $CONF[’email’], i.e. if your domain name is someblogmoney.com, use something like [email protected] as your notifications email. If you use a Yahoo mailbox, you will receive the above errors.

Edit footer link – If you want to add or remove a footer link, edit themes\dolphin\html\wrapper.html. Removing a link is easy, around <div class=”footer-links”>, delete the line you want. What about adding a link? For example, you want to add a link for DMCA info, add a line like this <a href=”{$url}/index.php?a=info&b=dmca” rel=”loadpage”>{$lng->dmca}</a>, save. Add a file dmca.html, and place it in themes\dolphin\html\info. Add a line ‘dmca’ => $LNG[‘dmca’], in sources\info.php. Don’t forget to define $LNG[‘dmca’] in languages\english.php, e.g. $LNG[‘dmca’] = ‘Digital Millennium Copyright Act Notice’;

Add more fields in General Settings – For this particular project, I need to add more fields like “Job Role”, “Field of Practice” in the profile page. The first step is to sign in your phpMyAdmin from cPanel, select your database, add more rows to your table user. Next, you need to edit a few files. Open themes\dolphin\html\settings\general.html, somewhere around one of those <div class=”page-input-container”> blocks, copy a block, modify, add or remove any fields you want to display. To process those additional field data, select sources\settings.php, somewhere around $userSettings = $updateUserSettings->getSettings(); add the necessary modification. Also, edit the file includes\classes.php, somewhere around function profileData and getUser, add your field names to the query statement. Then finally, in the same file classes.php, somewhere around // About section, add your modification, that is how things going to appear in your public “About” page. Again, open languages\english.php, don’t forget to define any $LNG variables you used.

Add more fields to the frontpage’s register section – The original register form is really simple, and I plan to add one more field. Edit sources\welcome.php, inside the loop if(isset($_POST[‘register’])), add a variable. Edit themes\dolphin\html\welcome\content.html, somewhere around <div class=”welcome-inputs”>, add the field. Edit includes\classes.php, modify function query () in class register. The field which I added is a select element. The style doesn’t look exactly the same as the one in profile page. So I edit themes\dolphin=style.css, copy the select style from .page-input-container and paste it to .welcome-inputs select.

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