Interview with Andrew Boon, Director of Boonex
The roots of Boonex are deep enough to call this company one of the pioneers of dating communities market. Here is an exclusive insight for the readers of Dating Ad Network blog on Boonex’s present and future products.
Q: What Boonex offers for dating communities?
A: BoonEx main product - Dolphin Smart Community Builder evolved from aeDating - a commercial dating website platform which was wildly popular for building dating and matchmaking sites. Dolphin has become a much more powerful solution but retained all dating-related functionality and improved it. Now you can grab a free copy of Dolphin and create a dating site of your own in no time. Moreover, you can always use social-networking tools to improve the site traffic, popularity and customer interaction.
Dating sites get more money, social networks get more “clicks” - with Dolphin you get both.
BoonEx products provide an all-inclusive opportunity to create a unique dating site with advanced audio/video communication tools, configurable profiles, couple-profiles support and matchmaking engine.
We strongly believe that Dolphin is the world’s best platform for online dating website deployment and you can easily give it a try by installing a free (ad-supported) version. The best part though is that we have a dynamic development team that makes Dolphin better and better every year keeping our customer highly competitive in the Web 2.0 market.
Q: What is the advantage of your solutions?
A: The major advantage is the real community behind our products. Over 30,000 webmasters around the world use BoonEx software and they help each other through BoonEx Unity - free professional support community for BoonEx software users. BoonEx Unity provides discussion and collaboration venues and is a marketplace for extensions, plugins, templates, and language packs. What you see as a default Dolphin installation is just a tip of the iceberg – this professional support community is the main force.
Another major advantage is the openness. Dolphin is open-source and we’re moving towards turning Ray into an open-source product as well. We encourage participation of independent web developers and continuously interact with the community. Almost every bit and piece of the code you see in our products is the result of an open discussion.
And finally, Dolphin backed by Ray and Orca is by far the most feature-rich community software package available on the Net. Out-of-the-box! When you dig in you realize that it’s got everything – multi-user video chat and messenger; collaboration whiteboards; video player; media recorders and converters; customizable user profiles; unique WYSIWYG site builders for admin; advanced search system; 100% AJAX-based forum and much, much more.
Q: What is your latest product and plans for the future?
A: Two of our most important plans are the upcoming release of Dolphin 7 and then major overhaul of all products basing on our newly-developed framework - Poseidon.
Dolphin 7 is likely to be rolled-out in the beta-stage in a few weeks, with full design/layout and site structure re-make and some new, exciting features. The plan is to release a refined, stable, good-looking and feature-packed version which would work as bridge to Poseidon-based products later on. Dolphin 7 is meant to become the final stage of the current product evolution.
Poseidon, however, is a revolution. It’s a whole new approach, based on the very latest technologies and solutions, carefully planned and implemented only by our most experienced specialists.
Q: Can you list some of these revolutionary features?
A: Poseidon brings major advancements, some of which are:
- 100% separation of core and functional modules. Poseidon treats everything as a plugin. Blog, search form, photos browser, comments, video player, you name it. Upgrade, modify, delete, activate or add new plugins and your site is still rock-solid.
- Super-simple upgrades. Thanks to full separation of plugins and core, you can upgrade separate plugins selectively. Upgrade the core with minimal impact on plugins and with proper compatibility verification.
- Ecosystem. We have Unity, Expertzzz and a few 3d party partners that we’re getting together to develop modules for Poseidon. Unlike Dolphin 6 mods, Poseidon Plugins distribution and installation is very simple. Ever purchased music from iTunes? It’s THAT simple.
- Designed for colossal performance. Poseidon is intended for massive traffic loads. Not “adapted”, but developed from the ground up with millions of users in mind. This is what so many of you have written about and have waited for!
- Latest technology. While Dolphin 6 is a product of evolution, Poseidon is based on the latest and greatest web-development technologies, solutions and practices. Completely new design, thought-out user interface, superior site structure and an all-new approach for the admin interface.
- Stability and security. Again, thanks to separation of the core and plugins we are building a lot more stable and secure core.
- Better code. Poseidon development is heavily supervised to ensure highest programming standards.
- Openness. Poseidon is going to be released under an open-source license and will support 3-rd party modules/apps the same as native plugins. From the very beginning, Poseidon will support OpenSocial apps and will treat them as plugins. Plugins developed by Unity members or even your own team would all seamlessly become parts of your site.
- Top-notch templating and language systems.
- Simplified licensing. Poseidon-based products would have a lot less hassle in terms of licensing than the current version of Dolphin, Orca and Ray.
- Built-in Ray Widgets. All, and some new, Ray widgets are going to become Poseidon plugins, without the need to buy extra licenses and without separate installation.
We invest lots of resources into Poseidon and plan to release not one, but a few products, based on it, including some dating-specific offerings.
Q: Looks like you are bringing some promising improvements into the dating software market?
A: BoonEx is all about constant improvement and innovation. We were the first in our industry to introduce interactive site-builders, first to add multiple flash-based communication widgets and 100% AJAX-based forum. Now, we have even more ambitious plans and we’re sure that Poseidon will change the industry and the Internet.
Are you working in the online dating business? Interested in interview? Submit your interview inquiries here.
November 12th, 2008 at 1:02 pm
As nice as Boon makes this sound, the truth is that Dolphin is not supported at all, by the community. Everyone wants others to pay to learn how to use it and documentation is very sparse. We used Dolphin and it was a major pain to get even the simplest questions answered. We will be transitioning to a different platform in the future, mostly because of this key distinction of Dolphin - lack of support and documentation.
November 12th, 2008 at 1:28 pm
[...] as well). Your comments and suggestions for stories are welcomed.Dating Ad Network has interviewed Andrew Boon, Director of Boonex, about the upcoming Dolphin 7 and underlying Poseidon infrastructure. Disclaimer: [...]
November 13th, 2008 at 11:20 am
[...] Ad Network has interviewed Andrew Boon, Director of Boonex, about the [...]
November 13th, 2008 at 1:43 pm
The problem as I see it is that Dolphin is just a bad piece of software. These guys can everything - create excitement and hype around mediocre products, make promises, look like they listen to people but they just can’t write good software.
When you look at the code and database structure, it’s like 30 people wrote it simultaneously without thinking/discussing/projecting. You can start developing for Dolphin within 5 minutes (because there’s no structure at all) - but you can’t get this damn thing finally working. By fixing bugs you can easily break other features. Things are being like that with all their releases in spite of them saying “this time it’s different and we fixed all bugs we could find” every time.
Their community revolves around freelancers seeking to make a quick buck out of clueless people. Bon, you call that community? Ecosystem?
November 19th, 2008 at 4:29 am
“It’s not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better, the credit belongs to the man of the arena who’s face is marred by dust, sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who knows the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause, who at best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement and who at worst if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who have never known neither victory nor defeat”
Theodore Roosevelt
December 2nd, 2008 at 12:53 am
I would have to agree with Robert Lee and Craig about their comments, when it comes to Dolphin. We also made a purchase for this software and paid almost $1,000.00 dollars for one of the other projects that we were launching earlier this year. The support was horrible and even my team, of very well versed programmers, could not make simple changes to it. When we asked for support it was nearly impossible to get. The majority of our questions went unanswered.
I respect anyone that makes a stance in the marketplace with their software, but Dolphin is by far not a good piece of software. It is very resource intensive, cumbersome, hard to manage and the support/documentation for it is just down right LOUSY.
From a 1 to 10 overall rating I would have to call it a 3.
If you are looking for good dating software that is well documented, easy to manage, and has decent support I would highly recommend http://www.vldpersonals.com.
December 2nd, 2008 at 5:23 pm
Dolphin is the best of the rest when it comes to out of the box dating/social networking scripts.
If phpbb wrote a perfect forum script first time out, there would be no need for phpbb2 or phpbb3 would there? There would be no need for phpbb2/3 to release bug fixes would there? But they do and they have been around for over 10 years. A lot longer than Boonex.
The people that bad mouth Dolphin have no right to, Dolphin works, it is the best you’ll ever find, Yes Boonex support is Below average, but i understand why, they get 1,000 of emails like “my site wont work why?” i dont reply to that crap in the forums, why would boonex pay a member of staff to reply to that?
Robert Lee, to suggest that all unity members only reply if you are willing to pay them, is just not true, and to suggest that Unity members do not offer any help is also not true. I for one have posted over 500 replies to quetions asked in the forums, and spent countless hours posting server configurations to help others get their sites running. I am also writing a Dolphin for Dummies guide to improve the Documentation. All for free and using my time, where i could be making money from my own work and businesses, and i am not the only one. lots of others help.
Boonex makes mistakes, we all make mistakes. but i am not afraid to make my feelings public and post in my blog when Boonex makes a mistake. Try reading my blog on Unity and you’ll see what i am talking about. But i will defend Boonex when people say that Dolphin is the biggest load of crap they ever seen.
The sad fact is today, people see the drag and drop page builder and think because they can copy and paste a myspace background on myspace, Dolphin is going to be so easy they’ll make a site and millions of dollars and become an over night webmaster. Dream on, you need to learn to read, use the search, and have some IT/webmaster skills before you even attempt to use Dolphin.
Boonex, you Rock. at least the people who are professional know what you offer is the best on the market.
I’ll still post and keep you on your toes Mr Boon when things aint going good.
Sammie
December 6th, 2008 at 5:06 pm
i have installed Boonex in my site http://www.dodado.com and i love it too much
January 18th, 2009 at 7:33 pm
I love Dolphin!! Its a great software Package! I am proud to use it on my site!! It can be viewed at http://theparadiselost.net
May 12th, 2009 at 12:38 am
I disagree totally with Sammie. She’s definately one of boonex employees or else she wouldn’t brag so much knowing that what she says just isnt true. I’ve tried dolphin software ever since 5.6 version.. EVERY version so far has been totally full of bugs with very little functionality.. And boonex has NEVER fixed the bugs in any version.. instead they move on to a newer totally different version , abandoning that project while promising it’ll be better next time, but never has boonex created a functioning software.. and its not free.. not if you want your own site instead of an advertising site for boonex.. if you use their free version, it basically belongs to boonex and as I stated , neither free nor paid versions work worth a diddly.