Boonex released Dolphin 7 Beta 8 on October 28, 2009. The blog post at Boonex Unity by unoboonex says that it includes a Dolphin 6 to Dolphin 7 data transfer script. Which seems to imply that you can update your Dolphin 6 database to Dolphin 7. So far, I haven't seen anything posted about the success rate, or just how user friendly this might be, or if it even works for that matter. Hopefully it does, or at least by the time Dolphin 7 Stable is finally released.

Then just two days later on October 30, 2009 comes a new blog post at unity by VictorT, which talks about Dolphin 7 Beta 8 update. As far as I can tell there seems to have been a lot of error/bug reports regarding Beta 8 from this blog post. If you visit this update they have posted a Beta 8 revision for download.

One other thing of importance they talk about in the Beta 8 update blog post is that Dolphin 7 now requires at least PHP 5.2.0, which might be a burden to some people. Since most people are hosting Dolphin on shared hosting packages they really have no control over what PHP version their host is using. Many hosts do a decent job at keeping PHP updated and stable, but not all hosts are quick to update each time a new stable version is available.

So the more I read these Boonex Unity Blog Posts by Team / Staff members the more confusion they seem to be bringing upon themselves. It has obviously been a long time since we first heard about Dolphin 7 on the way. We have been plagued with many bugs, 8 Beta's and counting now with no RC or Stable version yet. And now it appears that PHP 5.2.0 or greater will be one of the minimum requirements.

I know there is a lot of work, planning, and time that goes into something like this, but it shouldn't be this confusing. Each time I read a new Unity Blog Post there seems to be some new requirement or change.

I am still wondering if we will see Dolphin 7 Stable released before the end of the year.