Realtors use Joomla and OpenRealty

Posted on May 31, 2007
Filed Under Real Estate News | 7 Comments

Beautiful and Impressive Real Estate Web Site Design Solutions

If you’re a Realtor or real estate professional, the trio of applications that always comes to mind when I suggest products for successful entry to mid range level sites is Joomla, WordPress and OpenRealty almost exclusively. The reasons for considering these three apart from the obvious short learning curve time and relative ease of configuration is that each of these applications are so widely used and supported that even a novice can begin an effective corporate level site. The fact that literally thousands of people across the globe support these applications when compared to other products pale in comparison on this single facet.

Lets take a look at a few features regarding each application to give you a better perspective and we will go in order of relevance to from real estate listing manager to marketing and promotion;

Open Realty Real Estate Listing Manager

Now previously Open Realty has had its ups and downs in terms of quality since its conception but the developers at Transparent Technologies have done a great job in keeping Open Realty open source and freely available as to allow input from other developers to always improve its quality.

In recent weeks, I ported and repackaged Open Realty 240 with a pair of commercial grade default templates while still honoring the original license by still making it freely available. The motive behind this is solely from a design and marketing point of view and not to Fork per se Open Realty but to provide a different packaged solution that is more inline with the typical Realtor we encounter. Does this change Open Realty? Not at all! Open Realty is a quality application and those backing it are just as dedicated and professional as any commercial application developers.

Open Realty as an application is certainly up to the task for any entry level or moderate sized real estate office and has the kinds of features that make it a worthwhile development foundation for many types of sites including those of the FSBO and rental or condo type listing sites. Technically, Open Realty is essentially little more than a gallery script with some additional features that aid in organization and searchability of listings, “regardless of type”. I’ve used Open Realty in one fashion or another over the years for everything from Automotive trader sites to pet stores and even photography galleries for an sportsmen outfitter and guide service.

Benefits? Open Realty has a very nice set of features that permit the site owner to provide registered user advanced new listings notifications along with RSS, decent search features, categorization of listing types like rentals, residential and so on, and a lofty inventory of other features capable of humbling some commercial applications in use today.

Open Realty and The MLS

Integrating Open Realty with RETS and or IDX does take a bit of skill, knowledge and finesse but many like myself have managed to get Open Realty to successfully house almost 50,000 listings. My greatest achievement using a modified version of Open Realty involved just shy of 50,000 listings and included a custom Google maps feature developed in Romania by an associate developer. Web sites of that size usually require a rather custom and commercial grade solution like the UltimateIDX which isn’t really a competing product to Open Realty but rather a dedicated IDX utility where tens of thousands of listings are in play. I’ll get to more on the UltimateIDX later but for now Lets look at RETS real quick.

Open Realty with RETS MLS using vieleRETS

vieleRETS and Mark Lesswing are synonymous as Mark is the current acting president of Realtors.org and the brain child of vieleRETS. vieleRETS is essentially an application used for connecting to, downloading from and populating of your local websites listings database with listings from the MLS. Real Estate site owners wanting to provide thousands of real estate listings for on their websites can do so using the vieleRETS as the solution providing the MLS provider has a compliant RETS server. I’ve performed so many of these RETS / Open Realty integrations that I routinely now provide tech support for users of the application. Mark Lesswing, the developer and other tech support associates can be reached by visiting this link http://www.crt.realtors.org/projects/rets/viele/support.html

But what of IDX and Open Realty? IDX on the other hand is an entirely different animal with the same motive. Unlike RETS which is essentially an XML wrapper that provides a means of bringing together two or more databases; IDX is almost exclusively a technology born of the Realtors MLS. The idea behind it was to bring MLS board members a means of displaying each others listings across many networks. IDX literally means Internet Data Exchange and although I’ve over simplified it extensively there are resources and articles about this technology on The Brokers Edge.

Now using Open Realty with either IDX or RETS in and of itself is not a drop in ready in 10 minutes solution. I’ve been able in the past to use a custom script from FNIS Fidelity to populate the Open Realty database with listings from the MLS and I’ve used a Java solution called OPEN RETS as well. Regardless of your MLS’s solution they provide most of those that are not in the business of controlling its members do provide means for Realtors to access and publish listings. RETS is also not the ideal solution where speed is required for updates as RETS is quite literally a download and populate one at a time solution while IDX is usually a technique involving bulk daily archives.

Joomla For Realtors / Real Estate

Joomla is a product that has grown so popular and powerful that publishers the likes of CNN, MSNBC, Ziff Davis, and even conglomerate giant AOL Time Warner have given this rebel application some serious press. Joomla is so popular and powerful in fact that many people who have used commercial applications for years have switched or migrate their solutions to Joomla after exploration of its popularity.

Mentioned frequently in PC Industry Magazines, Joomla is never spoken of in terms of negative reviews and I’ve yet to find any example to correct me on this.

Joomla is a product I call a rebel because it was born in a whirlwind of attitude, anti open source and some opposition. Motivated by a unique global agenda of dedicated professionals, Joomla is the offshoot of the mega popular Mambo CMS. Joomla, eventually forked in early 2006 and has grown to become not just a phenomenon in the way web sites are built but stands in my professional opinion the largest single motivating factor for the explosion in QUALITY CMS driven web sites. CMS means “Content Management System” not to be confused with client management system.

Rather than try to compress all the things that are possible with Joomla lets just articulate its power for Realtors and the Real Estate professional by boldly stating the types of people and industries using the product. Here is a short list; City Governments (many), Police Departments, City Chambers of Commerce, School Districts, Corporations, Magazines, Commercial Technical Sites, US Military specifically the US Army, British Parliament, Indian Parliament, African Counsel of Foreign Affairs in Liberia, Professional News sources, countless professional services sites, legal firm sites, insurance agencies, product distributors and manufacturers and it goes on and on. I could list the uses for weeks and still be just scratching the surface.

To understand Joomla is to look at it as more than an open source website application and see it as designers and developers see it and that is as a development and design “PLATFORM” not unlike in many comparative ways to that of commercial development applications like DreamWeaver, Cold Fusion, or even Microsoft’s web development platform. I don’t say this lightly because Joomla is open source and licensed in such a way that customization and commercialization of expansion components has driven an industry all of its own.

Now there are applications specifically designed to integrate with Joomla for the Real Estate professional and of all those we have installed, used, reviewed, administered and developed with only two outside of Open Realty can I really consider mention of. HotProperties and EZ Realty, neither of which are at all simple to use or customize at this current time. Because of this, Open Realty stands as the largest motivator for our suggesting it to Real Estate Professionals in conjunction with Joomla for Real Estate sites.

How to bridle and dictate to search engines with Joomla

The single most important facet of using Joomla as your CMS solution is the simple and liberating fact that Joomla is a search engine capable product seated in the commanders chair. Its truly and quite literally a benefactor to site developers and designers wanting not only power but flexibility in the way they get indexed. Am I a bit too arrogant on this one? Let me explain before you jump to conclusion. Joomla by way of third party components and tools, gives you, the site owner, the power to take control over the way your site title, meta, and url’s appear to search engines. Going even further Joomla was engineered by a foundation of geniuses who just happen to be occupants of three camps, that of developers, that of SEO professionals and that of designers and because of this the development team kept in mind something I preach over and over and over again. Guided intuitive navigation. Quote it, remember it, design and live by it.

Joomla features and benefits are spoken of exhaustively in the new online resource and magazine over at The Brokers Edge along with introduction to proprietary solutions.

WordPress for Realtors and Real Estate

I can summarize a WordPress blog for the real estate professional in one sentence; “WordPress blogs are search engine food” end sentence.

No other single application has been used more profoundly in concert with the apparent marriage made in heaven between search engines and blogs. What I mean by that is this; I rank blogs specifically WordPress blogs as being more effective overall in terms of bulk availability of content for search engines. WordPress can quite honeslty in many ways can easily and effortlessly rival the search engine effectiveness of Joomla and other CMS’s with little effort. WordPress as a blogging tool is more powerful, more flexible and more widely used than any other blog solution on the internet. I can back all of that up without flinching;

WordPress Blogs are a one sided victory

To begin with big names; The Steven Colbert Report, Rosie O’Donnell, Bill O’Reilly, Microsoft Developers Tech Centers, Countless celebrities and syndicated journalists, political candidates, legal professionals, government agencies, churches, any University worthy of mention, thousands of educational institutions, countless Realtors, and it goes on. This is a dismal and trivial attempt to list the broad estimated 1.1 million WordPress blogs in use today.

I can go on this rant forever when it comes to WordPress and how Realtors are finding that a quality real estate template and WordPress can go a long ways to improving a sites ranking and indexing.

Bring em together, Joomla, WordPress and OpenRealty

Each of these applications does require hosting on a LAMP system aka Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP and although there is the possibility for hosting on a Windows server the benefits can be tragically diminished. Although a server using WAMP or Windows Apache MySQL and PHP is being done, most opt instead to use MS SQL and Postgre SQL as the database. This is certainly true of government and educational institutions.

For bringing these together I’m going to refer you to my blog on The Brokers Edge to explain in some detail the benefit of using WordPress, Open Realty and Joomla in concert with one another including the integration of Template Design and features.

HTML Tables to CSS conversion

Posted on May 31, 2007
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Convert that HTML Table layout to a CSS XHTML layout

Seems to be a common request of me in recent days the conversion of tabled layouts to CSS. In the last week I’ve converted plenty of static HTML Table layout sites to the more lean and mean CSS type layout and one thing I always tell people is that if you are coming from a static type situation or even ASP, JSP, PHP, etc you can preserve your links and site structure with the use of Joomla and sometimes with the use of WordPress providing provision is setup in advance for such things.

Now what this means is in the event you have a site with great PR and indexing in Google and decide to move to a more dynamic database driven setup like Joomla you can keep your page rank and your existing link structure without risking loss of PR or rank. How, cleverly and if you ask me for examples I’ve got plenty.

I’m not a Realtor, I’m a web designer

Posted on May 31, 2007
Filed Under Design | Leave a Comment

I got a few emails over on my Brokers Edge blog located at http://www.thebrokersedge.com/blogs/jared/ and just so you know I’m not a Realtor. I do real estate templates for Joomla, WordPress, Blogger and even OpenRealty which was the first place of my original real estate designs.

Now I do build and design other things like corporate identity packages, letter heads and other template related products but ALL LOGO work gets outsourced.

I just thought I’d mention that.

Free WordPress 2.2 Realtor Themes

Posted on May 31, 2007
Filed Under Real Estate News | Leave a Comment

Again, in the past 8 months I’ve logged a few hundred themes downloads dating back to WordPress 2.0.3 and of those downloads for Free WordPress themes only two came from this blog.

I’m moving all blog templates for WordPress that are real estate related to The Brokers Edge and the rest will either be here, one of my 3 forums, or on my CSS Design Magic site.

Drop me an email if you have a question.

FREE OpenRealty Templates

Posted on May 31, 2007
Filed Under Real Estate News | 5 Comments

FREE OpenRealty and Real Estate WordPress Templates

You know its strange. Of the 1,100 downloads for my free open realty templates no one has ever sent me an email asking where the link to them is and I’ve arrogantly forgot to put one on this blog.

In the past 9 months more than 1,100 downloads of templates and themes have been done from my two sites that have them and in the past 9 months they are ALL, every single one, the result of links I published in forums and blogs around the web. How bizzar is that.

So I’m going nuts here. I’m going to delete every download location and move every single theme and template for OpenRealty over to The Brokers Edge main website this weekend just so I can get an email that lets me know bots or something aren’t responsible for all the downloads.

In the past 38 days I’ve recorded 2,800 hits on this blog and nearly 5 times that on my other two main blogs for the web design snippets and free templates. The funny thing is I can’t figure out the nature of the visits. I guess I need to switch to better stat software like Google Analytics.

Anyway for those HUMAN readers if you want access to those templates I’m not even going to provide a link on this blog you must go visit The Brokers Edge.

WordPress bbPress matching themes

Posted on May 31, 2007
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Time to revisit this subject. Today I was going through a redesign and upgrade project involving WordPress 2.2 and the bbPress theme and its a seriously lengthy endeavor. But I’m going to distribute twin themes on The Brokers Edge for such scenarios.

Is this a bad idea?
Visit The Brokers Edge to find our more.

osCMax osCommerce Templates

Posted on May 29, 2007
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osCMax osCommerce Template Foundations

Looking through my inventory late last night to clean up my auto archive drive I discovered I had created 5 different versions of osCMax template foundation masters ranging from all CSS layouts (heavily modified content tpl files) to variable width and and column layout masters. After testing them at about 1AM this morning on my demo domain with a few flavors of osCommerce, I was able to get all 5 versions of template masters working as drop in solutions. Now CRELoaded, which I also have master layouts for, I did not test as of yet. But if you are a web designer and or site owner this foundation set will be a beautiful little resource that can save you a spank of money.

Custom osCommerce and osCMax Templates for $30?

When you consider the costs of the average template for osCMax or osCommerce is in the neighborhood of $140 then compare it to the price of customization which can quickly reach $1,500, $30 almost sounds like a typo. Well its not and here is why.

To begin with, my colleagues in education and I have been working on the Rapid Template Design Series with every spare moment available in order to have it ready for the printers and in college bookstores by Fall Semester 2007. osCommerce has never been part of the objective in teaching template design for largely because of the hard coded nature that osCommerce requires for creating custom designs. In fact many of the variant ideas we had for the RTDS have been dropped because the concern for showing bias has always been forthright on our minds. So that lead up to a proposition in the structure of the RTDS in general. You can go almost anywhere on the internet and find some sort of template kit for some application that may be what you are looking for, but none of them have the same academic agenda from its conception as the RTDS does.

The beautiful thing about the entire RTD Series is that ANY instructor (college, high school, university, or trade school) can publish supplemental materials using the publishing features in the series and simply add them into the bundled syllabus expanding the course almost effortlessly without the need for costly alternatives.

When you consider that our competitors product from the current educational industry publishers, instructors are pretty much grid locked into a particular format for books and learning material. I mean the alternative is what? Write a book, build a course, maybe make a few power point slide shows? Not very exciting but none the less required for any unique application to a course. With the RTDS this is moot as our system has core components necessary for expanding or adding on to the course materials in what the industry simply calls supplementals.

So, I’m going to release this template foundation for osCommerce and osCMax with guides as a supplemental release. Price? $30, and will be the only supplemental in our series that is actually downloadable and not physical delivery as the RTDS is. So I’m calling this supplemental “Open Source Commerce Builder” RTDS supplemental

What does the Open Source Commerce Builder include?

It includes the 5 master template foundations for osCMax, a small collection of code snippets, a PDF manual, 38+ minutes of FLASH SWF or FLV format tutorials, and an assortment of other elements needed for the creation of a custom theme / template for osCommerce or osCMax without having to pay a designer like me a thousand dollars for your design.

How do I get it?

So simple I feel embarrassed for not using a PayPal button or order form. But this site is my personal NON business blog not one of my commerce sites so simply send $30 to sales - at - jaredsdesigns.com (it says Jared’sDesigns) and delivery will be via download link sent to the email address I receive in the PayPal notification. Delivery date will be June 4th unless you don’t care about the audio quality of the tutorials then I’ll email it the following day. My audio person only does freelance on weekends for designers and animators so I’ll have to wait until he can clean up the voice overs for me. If this isn’t important, I’ll send the following day.

Why wait until the following day to send? In the years I’ve been building templates for template clubs I’ve learned that all of them wait a day to deliver digital goods like these largely because when accepting PayPal its a good idea to make certain verification has been provided.

Memorial Day 2007

Posted on May 28, 2007
Filed Under Design | Leave a Comment

Thanks to every soldier and every other person in service to freedom. We thank you for the freedoms we enjoy.

Rapid Template Design Series

Posted on May 27, 2007
Filed Under Products | 1 Comment

Rapid Template Design Kit Renamed

Today I opened my mail sitting on the counter for three days and discovered that one of the colleges that use my RTDK (Rapid Template Design Kit) requests that I change the name.

An unusual request but valid none the less as I’ve long considered it myself, so here is the skinny on the pending updates. The reason behind the request is that it should reflect its use in various courses that use the kit such as PhotoShop for Web Masters, Introduction to Web Design, Graphics Design Games and Web, etc. All of these are non credit courses.

So after meeting briefly with the other three instructors who were responsible for the development of the instructional materials, we agreed we would change the name to Rapid Template Design Series. I wanted to name it Photoshop Design Series but there is a book with that title and a company that publishes a magazine also uses that name as well. I don’t want to tangle with big publishers so Rapid Template Design Series is what its now called.

A Little History of the RTDK

For those who don’t recall or may just be tuning in especially you who are educators and instructors, here is where the RTDK came from. The RTDK in part, started out back in 2003 as a small collection of tutorials on designing templates for a product called OpenRealty that I offered free of charge on my old site JaredsDesigns.com. Just shy of 1,800 copies in total were downloaded while it was available. Then…

In 2004 I was contracted to convert an existing K12 school districts static html website to a CMS which we chose Mambo after comparing it to more complex solutions available at the time. Part of our agreement was to provide three years tech support and a collection of instructional videos for the staff whom will use Mambo to administer the schools departments. Departments included for example physical education, math, english, the library and so on. Mambo CMS was a sure win because of its categories and sections way of organizing content. This became the second part of the mix.

Then the template kit materials became available in November 2004 and sold in the schools book store as nothing more than a shrink wrapped set of instructional papers, all pre punched for a three ring binder, two CD’s, the class syllabus, and a collection of assignments for use in a NON credit class on web design. Who the course was marketed to isn’t important, but the first kit was the precursor to our more lofty idea. Maintaining support materials for the half dozen schools that use this little instructional packet is quite simple as we only update the label on the cover per semester and update the versions of any tool included on the CD.

After NON students begin to buy the materials after having read my posts on my community college teachers blog, a few of us figured it might be a good idea for an online product. The materials in the bookstore are not self contained meaning that they require instruction. So the plan then was to provide instruction by video with an instructor to accompany the materials. A full blown course compliment was born.

Where is the template design kit?

Well if you attend colleges in Western Washington State you can likely get it in the book store. They DON’T DO mail order and if you need the course ASAP as a college then Packet Publishers and Distributors will have it in their catalog this summer. TCP will have it and so will Amazon in November of this year if deadlines are met. The online ordering version will be available on the site http://www.templatedesignkit.com this late summer and will be ranging in price from $9.95 to $149.95 depending on series (print, web, etc). Schools and colleges are discounted 70% on all series above the intro series and resellers and web site owners who sell the material will receive a generous price break as well. This is a physical delivery product because of weight, volume and number of computer files included with the printed guides.

If you have questions, contact me but please keep in mind that the current version does not have an ISBN as of yet so if you are from a school or college requiring ISBN numbers for your catalogs you should list it as supplemental materials until our application returns from the government. All materials are copyright 2004 - 2007.

Converting HTML to CSS

Posted on May 25, 2007
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I get asked this with more frequency in the last few months so until I can get the tutorial outlined I’ll extend the offer to anyone wanting this done to do any HTML page conversion to CSS $80 with limitations being applied only to complex menu’s and generator type apps.

So if you have an HTML site and you want to make it light, fast, validated, and current, send me the link and I’ll quote you accordingly.

Every conversion I do not only includes the documentation of the conversion but a style guide for the typography since we remove all of the inline styling code elements placed there by some generators like FrontPage.

keep looking »