Joomla WordPress OpenRealty Bridge Available!

Posted on October 19, 2008
Filed Under Real Estate News | 5 Comments

We finally released the Joomla OpenRealty bridge on EZProRealty yesterday along with our long awaited WP Realty plugin for WordPress and downloads have already exceeded what we initially had expected. Exceptionally well built and effective as these new plugins are, we feel we have achieved a new type of integration that keeps the designer, the SEO, and the site user in mind during its development. The idea behind each of these items was to build something that would be cleverly designed to be customized by designers, effective enough for search engine optimization and easy enough for end users to use.

I’ve been working on the WP Realty along with the developers of EZProRealty for more than 6 months off and on between client projects and I’m elated to see these come to fruition. These plugins are truly easy to administer solutions for turning the worlds most powerful blogging / CMS solutions into powerful real estate tools

I’ve written about my plans and ideas I’ve have had over the course of many months for these new items and I’m happy to say that this is only the beginning. With more than 250 downloads in under 24 hours, the developers and contributors take that as a sign to move forward with our initial plans of building a series of FREE addons and plugins you may find commercially elsewhere. Wanting to stay friendly with the developers at OpenRealty Addons, we will likely NOT compete with them. However, I’m not a programmer and I don’t have the final say for some things as I know for sure that tools for integrating new slide shows, google maps, XML data feed tools among others were planned long ago. Even our coveted IDX import scripts may actually end up as 100% FREE items for OpenRealty users.

Adding News Articles To OpenRealty

There are secondary benefits to the WordPress plugin called WP Realty in that you can build pre defined search results and then control the content that shows within the results. The idea of adding news articles to OpenRealty has long been an idea of mine after building a few rather complex Realtor sites. By adding random or even category specific articles at the bottom of pre defined search results pages you can increase your indexing success in search engines largely due to the unique content for the actual search result.

As you may very well know search results by and large are not unique enough to ever index in search engines, but a few of our clients have benefited from the technique of adding WordPress blog snippets at the bottom of pre defined search results to achieve this very difficult task. Now, when you create your predefined search results, you can add content relative to the result. But it does not end there.

One of the unique features with WP Realty and EZProRealty is the addition of a clever little javascript snippet that makes listing searches super efficient by NOT passing empty or null field values in the search string. OpenRealty as some may know passes all field values regardless of actual value in a GET string for the query. In instances where you have a search form that has maybe 15 fields, all fields get passed into the search string which can crash the OpenRealty MySQL database. By adding a little javascript we have been able to only pass fields that actually have a value. Now when build lengthy search forms with multiple fields the search submit will not pass fields which have a NULL value.

Pay special attention to what I just said above as I bring this together for you. With the new WP Realty and EZProRealty you can finally build a truly integrated solution between the CMS and your listings manager in a way that actually out performs stand alone alternatives. OpenRealty is a great listings manager but not a great content manager so the marriage of Joomla, WordPress or both together with OpenRealty provides the agent with the kind of website tool that most commercial entities are charging several thousand dollars a year to develop. Realtors are gravitating away from proprietary solutions at an alarming rate in part due to the economy and the need to find a cheaper solution to reduce their costs. This is the solution. You can build an impressive site, add in news articles, manage search forms with a greater degree of efficiency and build a site that will dance around the competition all for FREE!

WordPress CSS Drop-Down Menu

Posted on October 9, 2008
Filed Under Products in Review, Real Estate News | Leave a Comment

CSS Cascading Menus for WordPress

Although WordPress is a blog (journal) solution with a lofty inventory of features, more and more designers and developers are starting to employ WordPress as a micro CMS solution. CMS solutions like Joomla and Drupal (pronounced Dru-Paul) for instance are very robust and capable enough to easily handle large corporate level websites but is essentially overkill for the average website. The main advantage in using a CMS solution is the ability to manage the interface and individual content elements without the need to alter the core structure or template of the site. One particular CMS feature lacking in a WordPress blog is the ability to effectively manage navigation elements, the ordering and the structure of the links.

For the most part menu links are generated in WordPress dynamically each time a page or post is published usually in the default ordering according to post date. Menu management in WordPress is certainly possible for a skilled coder who can understand and manipulate WordPress template tags as I had demonstrated on the Las Vegas Real Estate blog in a previous post. But this technique is not easily applied for novice site designers and rarely an option for the end user without a lot of trial and error. The solution many seek is to use the drop in code snippets from WordPress’s own codex library which can provide a quasi solution to provide reasonably easy to manage menus. Most of the time the technique employed is to use the built in feature for category links where the sort order is known before the links are added.

What if there was a solution that could provide full menu management for WordPress? Maybe one that would include link ordering, link names and even link destination more like a CMS solution? Would WordPress developers and designers be more inclined to take advantage of WordPress features they have come to love and apply it to their CMS projects? I would boldly venture to say yes.

WordPress CSS suckerfish drop down menu

The Brokers Edge faced the same frustration with menu management on sites requiring CMS features but none so lofty as to suggest a solution like Joomla or Drupal. So, we put our heads together and came up with what we believed would be the best possible all round menu management solution called WP Menu Creator During our initial planning, the developers at The Brokers Edge kept in mind that the menus it would generate need to be as SEO friendly as they can be and must not have any real significant limitations in the structure and layout of the menu once it renders. We all essentially agreed that the menu structure should follow the XHTML / CSS standard unordered list method for producing link lists. This would provide endless possibilities for styling the aesthetic appearance of menus.

What the plugin does is quite simple on the surface. It simply provides an administrators interface for blog owners to manage their menus and links in an easy to understand format. Then by simple inclusion of a template tag into the sidebar or other areas of the template files, it renders the menu in that location. The output is plain old unordered lists which can even include nested lists if you require a suckerfish type cascading drop down multi level menu. Unique CSS ID and Class Selectors are added to the menu for endless styling options and control. Although the CSS and XHTML part of the menu can be complex for some users, it is none the less easily adapted for most navigation structures on many popular themes. To find out more about this FREE WordPress Plugin please feel free to visit The Brokers Edge


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