To The Moon And Back

My recent attempt to customize Boonex wasn’t exactly a success. Still, the experience was rewarding enough that I’m now more confident to try new applications.

Let me tell you a few things about Boonex.

It’s a free, open source software that lets you create dating sites, social networks, content sharing portals and more. It has the basic features every social networking site offers - forums, chats, profile pages, dating events, groups, classifieds, media galleries, blogs, articles. The first time I installed it, I was amazed by my ability to set up my very own social networking website. The wonders stopped there, though.

As a designer, I don’t think you’d encounter a lot of problems if your CSS coding skills range from good to excellent. The documentation is not yet available but there are several sites offering tutorials on how to install, customize, troubleshoot the Boonex app. For programmers though, the application is very problematic. The biggest problem that we had is that our client wanted to add several features that are not part of Boonex. Not only that, the said features needed to be delivered in two weeks time. Even if our programmer could handle these PHP customizations at a short amount of time, the Boonex issues started to make things slower than it already is. One minute the ‘Navigation Builder’ is working, the next minute it will stop loading the changes. The ‘Classifieds area’ won’t accept ads if you assign it to a Category without a Sub-category. The upload media worked on and off the first few days and stopped working completely on the last remaining weeks. There are so many bugs to mention and I will not list them all here. We tried to hire so-called Boonex experts but the guy that we contacted disappeared. We also talked to a few independent companies but it’s either they haven’t heard of Boonex or they just don’t want to touch it.

To cut the long story short, the project was discarded and we didn’t get paid. To think I’ve spent so many sleepless nights worrying about it. To give Boonex credit though, it was pretty easy to setup and use. Maybe if you use the standard features and try not to improve it, it will work just fine. But paying clients don’t waste money on standard features so if you want moolah, might as well go for Joomla. Now, that rhymes! I also heard about PHPizabi from this blog so feel free to explore that. I haven’t personally tried them but given my experience with Boonex, it’s always better to try and lose, than never try at all.

Still want to try? You might want to bookmark the following sites to help you get started
Boonex Website
Boonex Nerd
Expertzzz.com