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The more and more I look into the possibilities in what Dolphin Templates could be in the future I get excited. The excitement is in the module development for Dolphin Templates, I’ve seen some great modules that do some very sophisticated stuff. The problem however is that social networking templates need a homepage that in my opinion needs to be better. I find the problem with Dolphin templates is that the homepage layout can be restrictive, making custom items through the admin is focused on various columns but if you need something written in php to hard code the Dolphin templates homepage it’s very difficult as it’s controlled purely by the admin. Dolphin Templates could be so much better if you could take code snippets and inject them in a custom index page. This said I am sure there is a way. For me WordPress does this beautifully, you can add in a custom banner slider which transforms any homepage.

The future of the Dolphin Templates lays within the possibilities with the Dolphin template structure itself, you cannot add custom php classes as you need to abide by the Dolphin template codex. For real flexibility you need to have an easy to modify Dolphin templates framework, programming is challenging enough and by adding additional boundaries stops people diving in and getting an outcome. I believe the make and break of this CMS is the company who provides the CMS (Boonex), their expensive approach stops the popularity of the CMS, to really explode they need to re-order things and make it appealing for designers, agencies and sole users. As an agency I wouldn’t go for Dolphin purely because of the flexibilities in the Dolphin templates, WordPress gives that flexibility and easy to add on functionality, not only that it’s free and the plugins you get is crazy.

If Boonex can give agencies and designers a package and an easy to modify Dolphin templates along with the control over the positioning of the Dolphin templates header, footer, breadcrumb for each page and a marketplace that pushes free open source plugins I believe it will be a winner.