Ease of Customizations & Administration

• Dolphin - Wow! This product has so many bugs in it! A few of the panels in the Admin don't even configure anything. Moderators, for example, are not functional at all! You add people to the Moderators but they can't moderate anything. The Page Builder is a great tool when you are reading the marketing materials. However, to use the Page Builder is useless. It can only change or modify about 6 of the pages on the site while the other 50 are ... well ... not easily customized. Many of the labels you want to change for the fields are stored in the database. Others are stored on disk. Which are and which aren't will be your guess. Adding banners to Dolphin in useful locations is next to impossible. The banner manager only allows for 4 different positions and the positions are set in stone for all your pages. What if some pages have 1 column while others have 2 and others have 3 columns? Luckily Dolphin provides a usable site after installation because Administration and customization is a nightmare! You have total control over the code once downloaded but changing anything is like driving a dull knife through your skull.
• phpFox - Administration and customization is not easy with phpFox, but it is not as bad as Dolphin. Changing colors is hard and tedious but must be done unless you purchase a theme with the colors you want. Luckily the labels for all the fields are stored in the database and you can get to the from the admin panel. Adding new pages and changing code is possible, but not easy.
• Joomla - Joomla administration is pretty easy and straightforward. The downside to Joomla administration is that initial setup of all the components, modules, etc is VERY tedious. You have total control over most of the Joomla code and tweaking is pretty simple. Find and replace in most instances, if-else in others.
• Drupal - Administration is difficult at first. The learning curve associated with being a Drupal Administrator vs any of the other social networking platforms is VERY steep. However, once you have a grip on the terminology (nodes, taxonomy, etc) used in Drupal, you may very well not want to ever try another product for any of your projects. The customizations available with Drupal are unlimited ... well, limited only by if there is already a module to do it or the expertise to write the code for a new module. With this product, you have total control over everything. All you need is a person who can code PHP to fit into the well defined infrastructure in place for Drupal.
• Ning - Administration is very easy but customization is limited. You can change colors and where the blocks of content are laid out on the page but that is it. Any other customizations will cost you (ads, domain name mask, etc). The administration area in Ning is easy to use and laid out so it is very understandable. Ning is a remotely hosted solution, so forget about changing their code.
• Kickapps - The administration area of a Kickapps affiliate site could use some work. Not all options available in the documentation is available for modification in the admin area. Changing the stylesheets to match an existing site is a tough task too. Removing the ads or injecting your own will cost a pretty penny. We also noticed Java stacktraces on a number of occasions. Luckily this is the backend and not something your users will see. Creating widgets is getting easier with Kickapps, but is still not as intuitive as it needs to be. Since widgets are their selling point over at Kickapps, they need to get this down to a few clicks and voila, you have a widget. Kickapps is a remotely hosted solution so forget about changing their source code.