Planning now before removal of Flash Apps

A lot of people ran when Andrew Boon made his announcement.  Dolphin is all but dead as far as development is concern.  The current shipping version of Dolphin contains three simple bugs yet Boonex has not fix the bugs even though Deano gave the fixes to Boonex for free.  That screams very loudly about the future of Dolphin.  I am thinking that at some point, UNA will be rebranded as Dolphin.  If you recall, UNA was going to be named Dolphin at one time.

Once Cheetah is released as full version out of beta, then we can start marketing Cheetah and I think a lot of the old user base will come to Cheetah.  Many of them was very upset with Andrew when he basically threw all of their work and investment in Dolphin out the window.  Remember that marketing is very important to any project and it will be true with Cheetah.  I haven't done a lot of marketing yet because I think it is important to get Cheetah out of beta first.

This concerns me as well. I have three Dolphin licenses and Dolphin and unless I'm wrong, Dolphin will work for another year or so until Flash is finished. maybe it will continue to work after that, but I'm not very good at reading foggy crystal balls. As @Travelnotes has mentioned here or elsewhere, Dolphin is old technology with a tired interface and big changes are needed for Cheetah, or any other fork for that matter to be successful.

Facebook has killed the social networking market and fewer people are brave enough to start their own sites. I have a niche clientelle, but the word is, "We like Facebook even though we have to hunt for the things we want." One of my niche sites has a miserable 60 members, whereas there are over 200 similar groups scattered over facebook.  I liken it to Australia's worst Telco, with a shocking track record for quality and service, yet 80% of the population use them.  The shop next door offers cheaper prices and a better service, but it's empty. The  market leader has people queuing past the empty shop waiting to be served.

Because most people have adapted to mobile phones, few today are interested in creating or programming a site of their own. If they do, they're looking for a "Wix" solution of plug 'n' play. Sadly Dolphin/Cheetah is a far cry from that style of programming. In the early days when I became interested in Dolphin after building several non-internet databases for point of sale and costing, I concluded that most new Dolphin users abandoned the script within days, if not hours. I gave up because I was getting nowhere and became interested in Elgg because I was able to purchase a book that showed me how to use the script properly. I loved Elgg, but my users wanted a forum which Elgg didn't have. I then moved over to Oxwall which I also considered superior to Dolphin, but it never had the likes of Anton and Modzzz backing it with great third party modules. I also wanted a three column Gui, but Oxwall only supported two, something I appreciate now.

Finally there was Wiccle, but I arrived just as they slammed the door. They had a good concept; a free version with limited modules and a commercial version with most bells and whistles. Wiccle had a lot going for it and I'd love to see a few features end up in Cheetah. Sadly my free version of Wiccle which I still have, needed a free key to continue operating after 30 days. They closed down before I had a chance to get that key. If anyone want's a copy of the script, I'm happy to send it to you. I'm not sure if it will run on PHP 7.2 though. It's no good for a production site, but it has some great ideas.

So where does this lead us? Well I'm also concerned that the the demand isn't there for Cheetah to be financially viable, thus I was hoping to see it become a community project. I'm not able to contribute with coding, so my view isn't biased. I just feel it has a better chance of survival in the long term. Deano could still make money by offering $5-$10 tweaks. (I'm using that amount as a suggestion because it's proven that people don't mind spending five or ten bucks, but stop and think hard if it's any more. The tweaks don't have to be modules, but simple hacks that make the program better. They could even be built around an override system used in ZenCart or the template system in Cheetah. 

I guess I'm suggesting that Cheetah first becomes stable and free with maybe a few small additions. From then on, I'd be happy to see Deano make those "affordable" hacks or even develop modules.  There seem to be a few individuals out there making some kind of living from web programming and I've often mentioned Pablo from WYSIWYG Web Builder. He charges around $US 50 for new users and $30 for regulars to supply a version filled with dozens of new features. I started at version 4 but now its up to version 15 and I've purchased most in between.  https://www.wysiwygwebbuilder.com/  It comes with hundreds of templates and extensions, so it does represent great value for the dollar. Cheetah must do the same to gain a market share.

The question then becomes; how does the developers working on the project receive compensation for their work?  It may be noble to say that the goal of developing the best social networking platform on the planet is the reward in itself but that doesn't pay the bills.  Most open source projects are funded by donations; Linux Mint is one that comes to mind.  Oxwall allowed removal of attribution by making a donation.  They also had people that supported the work by donations above simply removing the attribution.  Maybe in the future the licensing can be dropped and replaced by other support methods; such as donations.  However, there isn't a large enough user base at the moment for that to be the case.

Please, what are your suggestions on how the project can be funded? 

Let's hope so, but I fear what will hold it back is the Dolphinesque need for a recurring licence.

To get a good following, it needs to be totally Open Source and Free.

There are so many scripts out there that are.

You can't just take one product, tidy it up a little and try to sell (license) it on as a new work, especially if you're expecting paying customers to find bugs and help fix them.

I'm sure Andrew is starting to see that with UNA too.

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Michel - Meta-Travel.com
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I think Cheetah will have a good following.  The move from Dolphin to UNA did not happen; for one, the Dolphin to UNA migration script is a nightmare.  The majority of the UNA users are new people that have come across the platform.  Hopefully, developers will gain an interest in Cheetah; I know that Modzzz has shown an interest but he is developing for UNA and Wordpress and told me that he is not going to base everything on one platform as he did in the past.  Another thing that is slowing UNA adoption is the same attitudes that Andrew Boon used with Dolphin.  For example, when asked why UNA did not have the pretty URL for member's profile, ie: http://domain.tld/user_name Andrew went into a long excuse on why it couldn't be done and why it was not a good idea.  Someone wrote a module to create the pretty URLs and it was a hit with the UNA users.

I know that one thing that will help push Cheetah forward is strong mobile support.  While I rarely go to the internet on my phone I know that many only use their phone for internet access.  I know that the majority of young teenagers uses mobile as their sole connection because it allows them to hide what they are doing from their parents; young girls can show the world their tits and arse from the comfort of their back gardens while Mum and Dad are watching the evening news LOL.

My plan is to put the videos and sounds in their respective module folders. I also believe that is where they belong. As JohnK pointed out, to follow what all of the other modules do for consistency.


If you look at the boonex team. There may be a few people there, but only one is doing most of the coding. Maybe 2. One of the reasons i am providing roles on this site. I need to pass off other time consuming projects to other people. The documentation, translation, video tutorials, and eventually moderation of these forums to others.

If you have noticed, i have gotten a lot more done on this project over the last month than i have over the past several months. The reason is i am currently unemployed due to COVID-19. Thus i have been able to work on this full time.

Once this project takes off, and starts earning a income from licensing and market fees, the plan is for me to quit my job and work on this full time. There is even a contributor roll here to act as kinda like a donations system, which i did not expect anything from anyway. Donations rarely ever work.

Anyhow, i am already planning to move videos and sounds into their respective modules.

Once the site is finished, and the market and other needed areas are finished. It will be full steam ahead on the cheetah code.

This is a good question and one I believe leads to many other questions:  "How, what, why and where"? Deano has previously stated that his current and primary goal is to fork Dolphin to the point where all traces of Boonex are removed other than in the mandatory headers. This he's done by replacing Bx with Ch etc., yet it would seem that as a one-person operation this has taken almost 18 months to achieve and by his own admission, there are still things in there that need to be fixed before he can move on.

I assume the next step will be giving Cheetah some kind of individual personality as can be seen from entries in GitHub. The removal of the Flash component is possibly the best place to start, considering Flash will be all but dead in a year or so. This is one major reason I'm interested in the Cheetah project, but  how long are these changes likely to take, given that it all seems to rest on the shoulders of one person?

In my opinion, any structural changes should be consistent in order to build an elegant script, rather than adding to the existing  train wreck. Thus, I assume that all modules would follow the same structure as every other module. In the case of Videos and Sound files, these should appear in their respective modules under the directory structure of "data/files". Pray tell, why should they be treated differently unless there's an absolute need to do so?

There are a few things I have been thinking about as we moved towards a first release.  If Flash apps are going to eventually be removed, then should we plan now on relocating where the video and sound files are stored?  Currently, video files and sound files are stored under the Flash directory for each type.  There is a file directory under the modules; I don't know the history of why Boonex placed video and sounds under Flash; did the Flash apps predate the modules?  It will be easy enough for anyone migrating from Dolphin to Cheetah to copy the videos and sounds from the Flash directory to the module directory.  Or we may want to store them outside of the modules under the Media directory.