Boonex and Scary PHP re-writes

They (boonex, creates of dolphin community) say that they have a "nice frontpage", for as long as you don't wish to have an alternative style or any revenue what-so-ever. There frontpage isn't the best but its not the worst, my ELGG frontpage was the worst, and I'll classify MySpace (my daring competitor whom shall die) as the best front page for social networks to-date.

The first thing you need to get rid of is that ugly flash/image preloader. It really doesn't say "Original Software" or "Unique Website" since it has boonex's preloaded text smeared all over it. My suggestion is replace it with a nice image, or remove altogther and create you own front page for you advanced users.

Next, we move on to the frontpage columns, there a bit big, and some look quite empty. The easiest way to fix this (is get content) or to go to your administration panel and move and rearrange this columns and today content though the lovely "Frontpage Builder." I would suggest to remove the boonex news and rss feeds from the bottom, unless you are a specific community then you can get rss feeds from your friendly websites. Google will appreciate it, and so will you.
IE I have the Web for dummies social network, and I'll add the Webforumz.com rss feed and the Seal Portal blog for web idiots rss feed.

Now, I'm not saying anything bad about boonex, they have a great software but it is original designed for there own website. Its just packaged and stamper with a 99$ price tag (for a commercial use license without boonex logos).

The first hideous navigation is the hover over on every link "Photos, Videos etc..." Wich restates you going to go to "Photos" in big letters and is kinda huge. So I changed it from A - B.

Click the image for the full version.

To do this go into your Admin panel and go to the style editor. If you have firefox and the webmaster toolbar you good if you don't here's how to edit that.

Select the "Genereal.css" from the css select drop down, then edit the size of the following classes.

.topPageHeader is the header for the roll-over navigation.
.hiddenMenuBgCont is the background of the roll-over menu.
.topCustomMenu is the name of the custom rollover menu, remember if you select the item it will display it as a fixed menu.
a, a:link are the links themselves, I added a class to mine, but you don't have to.

Next is the top Bonnex bar "Links ... Terms F&Q..." that should really be on the footer, for me I set it to display:none because it is already on the bottom in the default installation. The name of the class is .topestMenu , quite original name isn't it.

First the forums are not the best, and you still need to have a forum license and pay for it for commercial use. Yuck, another price. To remove it simply remove all the links to it from the frontpage, main menu, and profile page from the builders and you'll be fine. Or just create a redirect it the header of forums.php to a page that says, "I'm pending a re-write." Or something.

Next unless you want to road-kill your bandwidth and disk space, be cautious with the videos and music. My favorite thing to do is put a cap on the folder itself, which you can do with Linux not windows.