Dolphin Smart Community Builder is a universal, free, open source software that allows you to build any kind of online community. With a huge variety of features & options, you can quickly develop your very unique and successful website. Create dating sites, social networks, content sharing portals - you name it. Dolphin includes all the features of dating scripts and adds more. You just build the site of your dreams and deploy it instantly with the ease and elegance that only Dolphin can provide. For Free.

The script is a big one compared to many others and has way too many features to list here. To summarize, your Dolphin powered site contains Blogs, Photos, Music, Videos, Groups, Classifieds, Events, Polls, Forums, Articles, and Chat out of the box.

Home Page | Official Demo | Support Forum 1 | Support Forum 2

What is below is a detailed tutorial (incl. screencasts) on how to install Dolphin community builder, a PHP/MySQL script on your shared hosting account. I installed it at http://telug.us (hosted at DreamHost) as part of this tutorial. This is the kind of material I wished were present when I wanted to install it for the first time myself.

1. Download.

Dolphin comes in two versions:

a) Free version w/ ads
b) Ad-Free version that costs $39/year or a one-time $99 for unlimited ad-free usage

There’s no difference in the way both are installed. In this tutorial, I am going to guide you through the installation of free version w/ ads.

If your host provides shell (SSH) access, connect via WinSCP or one such client to your server, start the terminal, navigate to the directory where you want to install Dolphin and execute:

wget http://get.boonex.com/Dolphin-v.6.0-Free

Add .zip extension to the file that’s downloaded. Then execute the following to extract the contents:

unzip Dolphin-v.6.0-Free.zip

You may want to delete the .zip file now.

If you have FTP only access, then download Dolphin to your local computer from here, extract the contents, connect to your site using a FTP client, navigate to where you wanna install Dolphin, and upload the contents (you need not upload ray/modules/global/app/ffmpeg.exe).

I’ve recorded the screen activity of this step as a 800×600 flash movie (2:25 long) and you can watch it by clicking on the image below:

2. Visit the URL of your installation/install/index.php. Example: http://telug.us/install/index.php and click on INSTALL. You should see a bunch of files and directories that need to be CHMODed.

3. Execute the following commands one after another from the terminal (if you have FTP only access, use your FTP client):

chmod -v 777 ./articles ./backup ./media/images/banners ./chat ./forum ./media/images/gallery ./media/video ./media/images/profile ./media/images/profile_bg ./media/sound ./inc ./langs ./periodic ./tmp ./media/images/sdating ./cache ./media/images/blog ./groups/gallery ./media/images ./media/images/classifieds ./orca/cachejs ./orca/log ./groups/orca/log ./groups/orca/cachejs ./media/images/sharingImages ./media/images/promo ./ray/modules/im/files ./ray/modules/mp3/files ./ray/modules/movie/files ./ray/modules/music/files ./ray/modules/global/app/ffmpeg.exe

chmod -v 666 ./periodic/cmd.php ./periodic/notifies.php ./inc/params.inc.php ./ray/inc/header.inc.php ./ray/inc/cron.inc.php ./ray/modules/chat/js/admin.js ./ray/modules/im/js/invite.js ./ray/modules/im/js/open.js ./ray/modules/presence/js/update.js ./orca/inc/header.inc.php ./inc/menu_content.inc.php ./ray/modules/global/inc/header.inc.php ./ray/modules/global/inc/cron.inc.php ./ray/modules/global/js/integration.js ./periodic/tags.php

chmod -v 666 ./ray/modules/global/xml/config.xml ./ray/modules/global/xml/main.xml ./ray/modules/board/xml/config.xml ./ray/modules/board/xml/langs.xml ./ray/modules/board/xml/main.xml ./ray/modules/board/xml/skins.xml ./ray/modules/chat/xml/config.xml ./ray/modules/chat/xml/langs.xml ./ray/modules/chat/xml/main.xml ./ray/modules/chat/xml/skins.xml ./ray/modules/im/xml/config.xml ./ray/modules/im/xml/langs.xml ./ray/modules/im/xml/main.xml ./ray/modules/im/xml/skins.xml ./ray/modules/movie/xml/config.xml ./ray/modules/movie/xml/langs.xml ./ray/modules/movie/xml/main.xml ./ray/modules/movie/xml/skins.xml ./ray/modules/mp3/xml/config.xml ./ray/modules/mp3/xml/langs.xml ./ray/modules/mp3/xml/main.xml ./ray/modules/mp3/xml/skins.xml ./ray/modules/music/xml/config.xml ./ray/modules/music/xml/langs.xml ./ray/modules/music/xml/main.xml ./ray/modules/music/xml/skins.xml ./ray/modules/presence/xml/config.xml ./ray/modules/presence/xml/langs.xml ./ray/modules/presence/xml/main.xml ./ray/modules/presence/xml/skins.xml ./ray/modules/video/xml/config.xml ./ray/modules/video/xml/langs.xml ./ray/modules/video/xml/main.xml ./ray/modules/video/xml/skins.xml ./ray/modules/desktop/xml/config.xml ./ray/modules/desktop/xml/langs.xml ./ray/modules/desktop/xml/main.xml ./ray/modules/desktop/xml/skins.xml

chmod 777 ray/modules/board/files

Swich to the web page and hit CHECK. If you see that all the permissions are what they should be, hit NEXT.

4. Ensure that all the required libraries are present and click NEXT.

5. Log into your control/admin panel of your hosting, create a database (if your host allows you to) for Dolphin and assign full privileges to the DB user for this DB. Switch to the installation web page, type in your DB host name, DB name, DB user and DB password. Click NEXT.

6. Provide a title to your site, e-mail addresses, desired admin Username and Password. Click NEXT.

7. Set the cron jobs shown on the page using your host’s control/admin panel. “0 0″ means, the cron job has to run (i.e., the cmd.php file has to be accessed/touched) every midnight. “*/10″ means, every 10 minutes. If you are not comfortable w/ the cron job interface provided by your host, you can use the free service provided by webcron.org. Coming back to our installation page, click NEXT.

8. Type the following in your SSH’s command line terminal (ensure that you are in the installation directory):

chmod 755 inc periodc

chmod 644 periodic/cmd.php periodic/notifies.php periodic/tags.php

Click NEXT.

9. Remove the install directory like so:

rm -r install

10. That’s it! Refresh the page to see your brand new social community site powered by Dolphin. The admin panel is located at YourDolphinSite/admin.

The above steps from 2 to 10 can be viewed as a screencast (7:39 long) by clicking on the image below:

Post Install (Adminstering)

1. The main logo and the rotating banner images can be changed at admin/basic_settings.php.
2. You need to obtain a free license (applicable for one domain, for getting a license for another domain click on Get Free Licenses link) to use Dolphin. After registering, log in there, click on Licenses at the left, copy the license for Dolphin and paste it at admin/global_settings.php?cat=1.
3. Expand Plugins at the left and click on Ray Suite. To use any of those, you need to register them. I think it’s a bug in the system that there are two Music Player plugins listed. The licenses can be obtained from the same page mentioned earlier.
4. Video Recorder, Video Chat, Whiteboard and Video Messenger plugins require a Media Server to work. You can install one on your own (not sure if this is possible on shared hosting) or simply, use BoonEx’s Media Server. If you want to use those plugins, register them first. Then go to Ray Suite’s Base Settings, type in your site’s name (can be any), tick Use RMS, paste rms.boonex.com for the RMS IP, leave the port as is and hit SAVE.
5. Go through all the available options and make any other desired changes.