Dolphin PHP

Dolphin PHP — formally BoonEx Dolphin — is an open-source script written in PHP for building self-hosted social networking sites. During its heyday (roughly 2008–2015) it was one of the most popular ways to launch a niche community of your own: dating platforms, hobby networks, local portals and fan communities all ran on Dolphin. The "Dolphin PHP" label stuck because it distinguished the script from unrelated products sharing the name and signalled the technology it was built on.

How Dolphin works

Dolphin is a full community CMS designed for the classic LAMP stack — Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP. A standard installation ships with an extensive module set:

• member profiles with custom fields, friend connections and private messaging,
• groups, forums and blogs run by community members,
• media modules — photo galleries, video and audio sharing, plus chat and video chat that historically relied on Flash/RTMP,
• monetisation — premium memberships, paid features and ad placements,
• an extension market with third-party modules and themes.

Everything is organised around a template and module architecture, so site owners can restyle and extend the platform without touching the core. Being self-hosted, Dolphin gives the operator full ownership of member data — a key selling point versus building on someone else's social platform.

Dolphin in practice today

The project is now largely of legacy interest. BoonEx ended active development of the Dolphin 7 line in favour of its modern successor, UNA, and old installations typically require outdated PHP versions, complicating security patching. Operators of live Dolphin communities usually face three options: migrate to UNA, move to maintained alternatives such as phpFox or Sngine, or freeze the stack — an isolated VPS pinned to a compatible PHP version, firewalled aggressively and backed up regularly. Whatever the platform, community scripts of this kind are storage-hungry: user-uploaded video and images grow far faster than the database, which should drive the hosting plan's disk and bandwidth sizing.