Viewing your site before it goes live - Flush DNS

Posted on February 27, 2008
Filed Under Code Snippets, Technical Resources | 2 Comments

How to Flush DNS - See New Site Before It Resolves Live!

One of the greatest techniques ever used by responsible web designers.

I was chatting with Mack McMillan of UltimateIDX the other day when we got onto discussing the subject we frequently encounter with clients.  Many times clients want to see their blogs and websites prior to them going live and many times that isn’t easily done without some clever techniques I’ll reveal herein.  After having encountered this many times I realized that I should come up with a small guide on "how to build and view a site development prior to it going live"  when I came up with a little tool to distribute in order to help. So this post is generically in response to a common question being asked in forums.   Read more

Page Peel Open Ads Now Available

Posted on February 26, 2008
Filed Under Real Estate Websites | Leave a Comment

Flash Page Peel Effect with Open Ads Advertisements

Well it took me longer than I wanted but the page peel effect now works with Open Ads in rendering the advertisements. I’ll have this packaged up by morning with reworked documentation and added to the product list for those interested in using it.

No major changes from the past version this version does require you to have the latest OpenAds from OpenAds.org and requires you to plublish ads using the using the JavaScript method.   More on this later when I get it packaged up.

UPDATED FEB 27th 9:14 AM || SMALL UPDATE REQUIRED

While my coder was fixing the Featured Listings Anywhere code to include animated featured listing display he spent a great deal more time cleaning up the config.php file for me and as such the Page Peel Open Ads tool is going to be a day late. I’m sincerely sorry for the delay but such events dictate our schedule.

Open Realty Fork Pending?

Posted on February 26, 2008
Filed Under Real Estate News | 3 Comments

Open Realty Listings Manager Apparently Forked

Updated March 10th 2008 with Fork Name.

I received an email this afternoon from a company that has apparently forked the mega popular open source real estate tool, Open Realty.  EZ Pro Realty, seeks to bring several products together in hopes of creating a better off the shelf product for entry level agencies.

Although only sparse details were explained to me, the demo I was able to visit shows great promise.  I was able to notice almost instantly that the same old Open Realty structure was present on the surface, but diving into the demo site revealed some very interesting developments I’ll get to in a moment.

Will Open Realty copy its features?

I had asked the developers of the fork if they felt Open Realty would follow suite and copy features they now offer in the fork.  They boldly answer that they do not care if Open Realty takes every single one of their features and implements them. They further state that they wanted to set precedence for features Open Realty should have had from the beginning and that they had thought of offsetting such potential reversal of implementation in hopes both products would meet industry standards.  The developer states that the decision to offset the potential of reverse implementation of features takes place by creating similar features found in some of the Open Realty commercial add-ons that have been made available.  As some may know, Open Realty members do publish commercial add-ons ranging in price and features that most would agree are useful. 

This does however make perfect sense as the chat session with the developer went on to explain that Open Realty sits as the bare minimum a real estate listing script should be in terms of features and function and that in order to bring Open Realty to the industry standard as expected by Realtors, the inclusion of commercial add-ons was required.   Chad basically said this goes contrary to their belief and commercial add-ons available for Open Realty are features that are standard in his fork.  I have mixed emotions about such a philosophy as I myself use to publish commercial add-ons for Open Realty until I realized that every commercial effort I made for add-ons would be eventually copied or duplicated for use in or by Open Realty anyway so all of mine are now free.

Chad, the developer of the fork states, "commercial products being sold by various members of Open Realty are the kinds of features that should have been core in Open Realty and will be core in this fork".  In the developers notes on the demo, its described that the "forks" shall have features that should rarely be commercial and only in the instances of its use for highly customized solutions will commercial extensions exist. I guess we call that good news from an end users perspective. None the less, after only brief examination of the features I discovered the following complements to the fork;

  • CSV Loader
  • Custom Contact forms with SMS features
  • Google Maps
  • IDX management features
  • Enhanced Template Engine that offers a great deal more control for designers
  • PDF Support native with some clever use of predefined PDF templates.
  • Fully customizable featured listings rotator
  • Compare Listings Feature
  • Similar Listings Feature
  • Menu Management from the addon by embarques
  • Live Chat Monitor

And so much more with much of the changes being hidden from me.  I was unable to log into the admin panel or even visit the /admin directory of the forks demo but it was explained to me that the new admin panel seeks to achieve many things not entirely related to the listing manager. 

Having discovered my blog in a google search regarding my new plugin, the developers of this fork had asked me if they could include some of my specific Open Realty add-ons I have in inventory.  I naturally zipped up the entire inventory I had and send them over.

Open Realty Fork - WordPress Listings Plugin?

Does this information suck! Now I have to start writing for yet another Real Estate application and may need to potentially offer a variant of my WordPress Listings Plug-in for this fork.  Naturally my initial concern was that my pet project the FREE plugin for WordPress.  Even though I’ll be releasing the plug-in this week, I’ll likely have to alter it to work with the fork should it ever come to fruition.  As It was explained to me the fork makes only a half dozen real changes to the database structure and only a few dozen changes to the overall method featured listings and other property details are displayed so pulling the data with my WordPress plugin should be a minor modification.

For those who are not familiar my plug-in basically provides a way to display Open Realty Featured listings in your WordPress posts.   With that in mind, I thought given the super nice features in the fork, my including it as another tool for WordPress Real Estate sites would only strengthen the triplicate solutions in building effective real estate sites I use so frequently, Open Realty, Joomla and WordPress.

I guess we see how the fork goes as they release it in just 10 days with domains and support channels already in place.  All I can say in summary is that its about time.

Page Curl Effect - Open Ads

Posted on February 23, 2008
Filed Under Real Estate Websites | Leave a Comment

Page Flip and Page Curl Updates - Open Ads

Some time ago I purchased the resell rights to a product called Page Flip which we have since modified extensively.  I made the post here http://www.jaredritchey.com/flash-pagepeel-pageturn-effect.html originally.  Well after receiving the update changes to Open Ads It appears that the page curl snippet breaks. So I’m going to have my coder revamp that this weekend.

Previously this tool worked just fine with Open Ads and the guide that was included showed how to make it show up on select pages in your WordPress blog by using the custom fields feature and a snippet of PHP.  Well as it stands if you update your Open Ads your page curl will simply not work if you are generating ads from it.

I’ll try and get an update published tomorrow if I can get my coder to finish today.  Please remember, that if you purchased the existing version you will receive a FREE update once the code is completed.  Same is true of any purchases on any of my plug-ins that are commercial.

WordPress Realty Plug-in Branding

Posted on February 23, 2008
Filed Under Real Estate Websites | Leave a Comment

WordPress Real Estate Listings Plug-in UNBRANDED - Private Label

Its strange, all the feedback I get regarding the BETA version of my plug-in, only a half dozen responded regarding the testing details and yet none have responded or suggested regarding fixes that may be needed.  I thought I’d answer a few questions received in emails since the first of February where people have asked for this plug-in in hopes of getting more user questions related to this plug-in.

Is it branded and are their links off site?

SEO conscious as people and developers have become this was planned for long in advance of that very question. Because I too believe its nonsense for a plug-in developer to provide off site links where relevance isn’t present, I made the decision up front that NO off site links or branding will be used in my plug-ins.

Are Plug-in developers hindering your search engine ranking success?

I have had the same issue with plug-ins being off site linked and branded.  Goolge and other SE’s do care where you link to and those links matter in terms of relevance.  If I had put a link in my plug-in on your site, you would end up writing a post about a particular property listing where you then display a featured listings for that property class only to have your efforts penalized by a link to my site which is completely out of context to your post.

Some developers publish plug-ins with branded off-site links either not knowing the significance of their actions or deliberately indifferent to them.   Most courses of action have been to simply remove the links but that poses a serious issue as well.  Removing or altering the links to have a no-follow may violate release terms even if it isn’t a violation of the GNU / GPL or Creative Commons license.  Plug-in developers often give away their works in hopes that traffic will lead to contracts and future sales which is certainly a valid and honest motive but the method used can be counter productive as well.  There is however a small minority of developers so wrapped up in their ego that branding everything from the style sheets the naming conventions of files to reflect their bold self bolstering intention. Such is life.   Some do however provide solutions by offering a commercial license for next to nothing in price which leads me to my next plug-in publishing method.

Private Label and Private Branding for commercial use

Redistribution is already granted under the GNU / GPL license as Open Source as most may know.  The same rules apply to many plug-ins and that is; give credit where credit is do and keep the source code open even if you add to the plug-in among other familiar directive.  Seems simple right?

Private label options can be discussed but I’ve not put much thought into this beyond what people have asked for.  Some have asked for a version they can distribute that would be geared toward automotive or yacht sites that use Open Realty as the listing tool and WordPress as the CMS or main site blog. 

I must concede and agree that many sites would require modification to the plug-in and their featured listings templates in such a way that they would not appear as real estate related.  Quoting by permission, two of the beta testers asked;

Jared, is there a way to modify the titles and rendering parameters for city, state and… (she goes on to say)  I have a pet store  that uses the Instinct e-commerce plugin and I want to write posts about different breeds of cats and dogs and have the featured Animals show up according to different criteria when I write posts to help market pets we have for adoption better.

Beta tester two states;

I build automotive and yacht sites in the bay area for things like exotic car rentals and yacht rentals and want to see about a version for the car and yacht business. Your templates and wording relate to real estate which wont work for our needs. Can you make those things variables so we can select what titles show?  (added note by me) This person uses the plug-in as it was intended to be used. To market listings for whatever you plan on featuring by writing blog posts about the product then providing a randomizing featured "display" according to some criteria.

In these examples its easy to see that I should keep in mind that people other than Realtors (my intended target audience) will want to use this plug-in.  So as a result I’m going to see about having my coder look at making the variables for the search order according to user parameters.  Basically you the user will determine the fields to be used by entering them based on their name in the Open Realty database. So for instance if you want to display Featured Anything by a criteria such as "Dog Breed" as opposed to "City" then this will be made possible.  Some things fundamental to the function of this plug-in however will remain unchanged.  The "Class" and "AgentID" will remain the same even if "AgentID" is renamed.

WordPress IDX or RETS and Open Realty

Posted on February 23, 2008
Filed Under Week in Review | Leave a Comment

Is it possible to have a RETS and IDX Import for WordPress?

I’ve added a new category to my blog titled "Week in Review" which will include a run down of popular questions I"ve been asked in forums, blogs and by email that may be beneficial to readers of my blog.  This new category will also include weekly updates on the applications I work with frequently along with some brief examination of those I don’t.  So to make a first post in this category lets begin by addressing the past two weeks of emails I’ve received regarding this new plug-in and other apps.

I frequently get asked if the native functions of EZ Realty and Open Realty have the ability to handle IDX imports.  My answer is that although each of these applications can certainly have IDX data plugged in to them; neither app as of this date supports the feature natively.  The method we use to post MLS data from and IDX feed into Open Realty or EZ Realty is to simply create a custom import and extraction script that runs via a CRON after the mapping is done.  The general procedure then is to import ALL available fields into either Open Realty or EZ Realty and customize the presentation by determining which fields get published publicly. 

MLS Rules and Requirements dictate how information is displayed and Open Realty has a feature where you can hide things like the property address from people who are not logged in.  Therefore MLS’s require that only registered members of a Realtors site are  privy to such information.  This is almost globally true among all boards and all MLS providers regardless of RETS or IDX feeds. Rules naturally may vary from board to board.

What I usually do in 90% of all IDX or RETS installs into either application (OpenRealty or EZRealty) is map the data completely for all fields to be imported into the database. Then listings that are for the Realtor or Realtor and Agents of any particular office would have those listings FEATURED.  With a half dozen PHP scripts, the CRON to automate the process for either RETS or IDX are added and the entire MLS update takes place at a scheduled time. With RETS, the process can be a little different because some RETS providers do not adhere closely to the guidelines.  In instances where we can’t use vieleRETS downloader with some automated PHP, we use a custom tool we acquired from a former FNIS developer. 

Can I import the MLS data and still add our "office opens" and other listings?

With an MLS daily update this isn’t really advisable. Although it is possible to use an update change method with RETS and sometimes with IDX its exceptionally slow and burdensome on the CPU to process the data in such a way.  Because of this nearly all IDX imports that are done with either application are done by dumping the data and  simply reinstalling it with each successive update.  Most MLS’s provide the daily actives which are usually the only listings a site should have requirement for. So, rather than go through the daily archives and pick out changes, the process is vastly simpler and more efficient to simply reload the data.  So, what about open listings and properties NOT in the MLS?

There is a few ways I’d suggest handling this. The first would be to maintain a two installations of Open Realty for instance.  Although not easily done with EZ Realty (my argument confirmed yet again) Open Realty makes the solution to this extremely simple.  Most sites I’ve worked on usually keep opens in a directory titled /featured-listings ( or /featured, /featured-property, /opens etc…) and then the MLS import simply /listings .  The site structure allows the office or agent to provide listings NOT in the MLS such as properties they manager for rentals or whatever else in one location and the bulk MLS listings in a seperate installation.  Then, by simply bridging the login and user registration process the site now appears seamless.

With EZ Realty this isn’t EZ-ily done by any means and is usually requires us to use Open Realty in addition to EZ Realty for similar types of setup.  I’ve elated to this many times that I am no fan of integration because integration is simply NOT done on the corporate or commercial level but EZ Realty as an integrated solution is the exception and does have unique advantages over Open Realty we can cover in a subsequent post.  Integration is for the most part forcing two separate applications to work as one which goes contrary to the entire principle of well structured web solutions.  Because of this I’m not going to expand on this at this point and simply move on to yet another solution.

An alternative solution may be the Ultimate way to do IDX - The UltimateIDX

Lets start by assuming your objective is somewhere in the post above and that you want to have MLS listings NOT framed into your site for seamless use. Then the UltimateIDX may be the best solution.  A commercial product of The Brokers Edge, the UltimateIDX can work with Open Realty, Joomla, Drupal, WordPress, among dozens of applications we have tested for by seamlessly installing. The UltimateIDX is more than just a run of the mills IDX solution as the UltimateIDX not only provides agents and or offices with full MLS presence in their site but also provides with all the back end management tools necessary for an office to manage clients, email, contacts, floor duty, scheduling, documents, and other facets of a modern cutting edge brokerage. 

I’ll write a subsequent post on the UltimateIDX in a moment but for now, know that this solution is not only embarrassingly affordable its humbling in its features and ease of management make it an ideal solution HACK FREE to put listings in your EXISTING site.

Regardless of the steps you chose, doing so following proven recipes for success will substantially reduce your learning curve and time to launch.

Royalty FREE images for designers!

Posted on February 21, 2008
Filed Under Products in Review | Leave a Comment

Royalty FREE Distribution in Templates and Other Works

One thing that frustrates many designers who build templates is the unbelievably high cost for purchasing images that can be redistributed within their templates.  Purchasing a template at iStock photo or Big Stock for example nets you a use license of a single domain or single purpose NOT for redistribution. 

Large companies like Template Monster and others have the kind of budgets necessary to either employ a photographer or purchase royalty free distribution rights to photos.  To give you an idea as to what cost I’m referring to, consider this;  iStock has an option for a limited use distribution costing $100 per image.  Getty Image charges anywhere from $200 - $1800 per image.  These kinds of expenses make delivery of commercial or even free templates cost prohibitive resulting in people using freeware images which are frequently of lesser quality.

Royalty  FREE Stock Images - Template Designers - Distribution

I’ve discovered in the forums I’m a member of that a new company is about to launch that provides an answer to this pressing need by selling images on CD in packages, each of which is Royalty Free and can be used in your commercial and non commercial templates.  What this means for guys like us is that when we publish a new template and we need images and photos for various aspects of the template, we will soon have an affordable resource that not only gives us an inventory of images but a quality selection for one low price. 

Although price has not been set in stone, it was told to me that the $75 - $200 range will be chosen depending on image set and category.  So for the cost of a single commercial royalty free image we end up with a CD ROM of images for us to select from.  It appears that the first categories photographers are working on at this point is those associated to industrial and commercial real estate with residential real estate scheduled for the mix soon. 

I’m excited about this concept and I think this is a long over due service for designers and desktop publishing professionals everywhere.  I know all to well how frustrating it is for small mom and pop rag sheet publishers to find good quality royalty free images at an affordable cost is.  Many small publications google for images and publish them in hopes not to be caught but with this solution you can receive high resolution images at a price that doesn’t break the bank.

My suggestion to this new company should they ever stumble upon my blog is that they should include a feature on their site called "CD Builder" in which a buyer can assemble their own collection of images from those available and pay accordingly.  This would be a service that would make millions in my perspective.  Best of luck to the EZ Royalty FREE and their venture.  When a link becomes available I’ll publish a link.

How to hire an SEO professional

Posted on February 20, 2008
Filed Under Real Estate News | Leave a Comment

SEO Service - Things to consider

I had intended on publishing an article in my blog regarding this subject but the exposure would be best served on the forums so feel free to check it out.

How to hire an SEO professional

WordPress 2.5 Real Estate Listings Plugin

Posted on February 19, 2008
Filed Under Products | Leave a Comment

WordPress 2.5 Release Date Is Fast Approaching

With WordPress 2.5 being released just weeks from now, we installed an SVN version to examine compatibility with this plug-in required only  a single change. But having the release of 2.5 so close, why not just brand this for 2.5?

Since WordPress 2.5 is not likely to require modification to templates, we feel people will likely upgrade anyway. Because of this we know based on todays testing that the plug-in will be released for 2.5 and should have no problems working as far back as 2.2 even though we are going to publish it as being required that you have version 2.5  Just a branding thing to make it look brand new and in pace with the latest release of WP 2.5

VieleRets IDX RETS MLS WordPress Real Estate Listings

Oh yeah, did I mention that if you have a site that uses vieleRets or any number of RETS IDX solutions with Open Realty that those listings can go right into your WordPress blog?  Yep! We tested today with the demo RETS data from Realtor.org using vieleRETS 1.5 (not 1.6 as of yet) and it works flawlessly.

If you are using any flavor of the current MLS import tools into your Open Realty site then as long as you have agents who are active, listings with City, State, and Classes then this plug-in works fine. Yes the listings still need to be "Featured" in order to work correctly.

Open Realty Products Announced

Posted on February 17, 2008
Filed Under Code Snippets, Products | Leave a Comment

FREE Plug-ins - Add-ons for Open Realty

Google Maps, CSV loader and Flash Slide-Show for Open Realty are going to be included in the upcoming release of the new templates.  After the release of version 2.5 of Open Realty, all the designs I have harbored will be released free of charge.  On the horizon is also the Open Realty Add-On for custom forms which will feature an authentication method called "Session Token".  This FREE Add-On will work on any page published in Open Realty and will be fully customizable in similar fashion to the custom fields feature in Open Realty.

Available now commercially is the Dynamic FLASH Slide Show for listing details pages that replaces the java-script method.  The price is $24.95 and can display listings photos by a multitude of different transition effects. Fades, wipes, scrolls, and more.

Also currently available is the google maps feature for listings details pages.  This is currently a commercial item for $19.95 and will eventually be included in any commercial template being offered. A scaled down drop in version as mentioned above will be made available for free.

keep looking »

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