OpenRealty Addons Site

Posted on October 20, 2008
Filed Under Products, Professionals In Review, Real Estate News | Leave a Comment

Hey just a little point me there note about a new site being developed by a few colleagues called OpenRealtyAddons.com. Developers Judson Cooper and Al Smith have launched a site dedicated to the development of high quality addons for real estate professionals. The new site is very likely going to be the number one authoritative site on such things given how the developers operate.

Al Smith and Judson Cooper are extremely well versed with the inner workings of the OpenRealty application and have a combined level of experience in open source projects of 8+ years. Both active members of the OpenRealty community, these developers set out to produce a landing spot or addon hub so to speak for the product they are passionate about, OpenRealty.

Be sure to check out their new venture as we all wish them the best regards in the world in filling this long overdue void in this area.

EZPro Auto and WP Auto

Posted on October 19, 2008
Filed Under General | 5 Comments

WordPress Automotive Blogs

Now that EZPro Realty and WP Realty are available in the first release (technically first RC release) we decided to expand this a bit by providing customized versions for use in several other industries. Automotive, Boating, Furniture, Antiques along with any type of gallery required listings site will benefit from these new developments by turning WordPress into truly powerful marketing tools for such sites.

What does this mean? Many car dealerships and boating dealerships usually have to resort to common shopping cart solutions to display their inventory if they don’t flip the bill for a commercial solution. We felt that we could do justice to those industries by providing a simple core modification to OpenRealty along with our special versions of the EZProRealty component and WP Realty plugin to build truly impressive sites.

The method requires a site owner to simply replace the default OpenRealty language file with a new one we build which changes the site wide wording from real estate terms to automotive or boating terms. What we came up with in our first beta test was to simply underscore the language file as so, __lang.inc.php and upload ours. Then install either WP Realty or EZProRealty and the project is now set to be developed as an automotive listings or boat and yacht listings site.

Initially during the planning stages we had a few hold outs who could not escape their FSBO mentality for a moment to look at a few simple facts. The market we are approaching is not primarily FSBO. Next; Car, Truck, Boat and Yachting dealerships don’t sell these items via a PayPal Buy Now link. These items are costly enough to warrant the same type of site a real estate listings site would offer and that is a place to put all listings of cars, boats, trucks or whatever the case may be and then combine it with the power of WordPress or Joomla to build a truly turnkey solution that doesn’t cost a great deal to entertain. Last, there is no solution available for such dealerships anywhere on the web that is as efficient in URL structure and SEO friendliness as our two new products. I’d like to stress yet again that they are 100% FREE!

Joomla WordPress OpenRealty Bridge Available!

Posted on October 19, 2008
Filed Under Open Realty, Real Estate News | 4 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!

WP Realty Ready Download

Posted on October 15, 2008
Filed Under General | 5 Comments

Short post right now, things here changing substantially in the next two days so the project for WP Realty and WP Featured has been moved to EZProRealty.com and IS Available right now in the download section. Sorry about documentation, I’ve been slammed with client work and that takes precedence.

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

2008 Election Coverage

Posted on October 8, 2008
Filed Under General | 1 Comment

Jared Ritchey Runs For President

I’m Jared Ritchey and I approve this message. Why not? Look at the jokers running now. A one armed monkey could lead the nation better than these characters.

WP Realty and EZProRealty

Posted on October 8, 2008
Filed Under General, Real Estate News | 2 Comments

How to really piss people off!

I have this unusual method of operation with my blog in that I use it 95% of the time to announce a product “IN DEVELOPMENT” long before we actually start the project. Many times our plugins and addons are born out of some specific task related to a site development. So I’ll announce an idea as if its being developed for public free release usually to determine if the plugin or addon could be worth the efforts to produce. Granted its a bit unusual and can frustrate the hell out of people when they search for something only to find a site with potential product releases, does in fact have no actual product releases at all. I’ll explain why.

Who can boldly say they have an original thought anyway? Both WP Featured and WP Realty were both born of ideas and products for Joomla that take OpenRealty and bridge and in some ways integrate its features into the CMS for a more complete method of real estate website building. But WordPress had been overlooked for about two years as a viable target for an OpenRealty bridge because very few people know it can be made to operate as a full CMS solution. I work with WordPress, Joomla and OpenRealty easily for no less than 8 out of 14 hours in a given day. Merging, bridging and sometimes integrating them to work together is always on my mind.

Although people get a bit angry with my announcing products long before their actual release, I have to cautiously approach the development of such plugins and addons because I’m the guy flipping the bill. I’m not a programmer, I’m an interface designer and photoshop instructor with a strong background in RETS and IDX databases. So when it comes time to produce a FREE plugin I have to flip the bill to the coders to deliver a plugin that will actually be of some utility value to the end users. If its of no value then why bother producing it? I’m not into plugins for commercial gain and some have beat me up quite extensively by making comments in my blog that essentially accuse me of deliberately trying render their plugins and addons commercial value moot by giving away free alternatives to their efforts. That’s not entirely true for the most part as many times the plugins and addons we have built are for a specific project which is then later developed further to make it something worthy for a broad market. Usually in the absence or knowledge that a commercial alternative exists.

So I stress that although my blog posts about plugin and addon announcements in absence of a few actual plugins does in fact really annoy people; its important to note that I release all of my plugins as free items. I really love the open source market and need to be careful to see if my plans are worth a damn or not so I test the waters. After all I am the guy paying the bill to give away free products and some times I get an angel offering to fund the development to speed up the process which really helps. During this time people are certain to copy the ideas and even take our base code and complete it. I’ve said this in a previous post that such things are almost a guarantee;

Only the arrogant would call this exclusive. Other competing services are likely to copy this plug-in feature for their own solutions I can almost guarantee it.

WP Realty vs WP Featured

After dozens of emails It seems there is a bit of confusion between which plugin is which and what its purpose is. WP Realty is our (”our” meaning mine and the person financing the project) newest plugin for WordPress that goes beyond what WP Featured was to do. WP Realty is essentially a bridging solution that does for WordPress what EZProRealty does for Joomla. For those who don’t know, the EZProRealty component is a fully working bridging solution for Joomla that brings OpenRealty into the CMS. WP Realty does exactly the same thing for WordPress and although it works as it should there is a pending feature its lacking that has kept it in BETA. By Friday it will be published on EZProRealty.com and in part here as this is our chief concern this week. Yes its 100% FREE! Its not like WP Featured;

WP Featured is an entry level plugin that basically takes your OpenRealty listings and puts them into your WordPress blog which you can define by listing ID, zip code, city or any other type of field to better provide relevant content for individual or categorized listings. The existing download is fully RC 1 or more specific RC 1.0.1 and does not have all the features that many of my other posts have illuminated. The next release is simply going to jump in numbers (following the rules of version numbering) to version 2.0 since its a complete overhaul of the existing petty features 1.0.1 has.

Are these just more bullshit announcements for plugins that take forever to surface? Nope and there is financial motive this time around since an angel has offered to flip the bill. Although I’ve managed to talk them out of duplicating some commercial OpenRealty addons for free release, WP Realty and WP Featured are as active in development and release as is the XML export utility and the IDX Import Utility for OpenRealty. The latter two are available elsewhere as commercial products that my new found friend with cash wants to see become FREE and “open source”

NEW WordPress & OpenRealty Bridge

Posted on October 6, 2008
Filed Under Real Estate News, Real Estate Websites, WordPress Wisdom | 11 Comments

WordPress Realty has gotten much better as of 3PM today! I have ranted about this plugin for seven months now, testing and building in between client projects arriving at this point where I have the ONLY 100% free OpenRealty WordPress plugin bridge which is great. Today the developers of EZProRealty have decided to contract for another FREE version which will include a newly added feature for session management for bridging user logins and registrations between the applications.

After an hour long phone call with the developers of EZProRealty we decided upon taking my existing FREE PLUGIN and tossing it out the window and creating a new plugin with the same title “WP Realty” by combining several existing solutions into one complete solution. This new plugin or should I say a rework of the old plugin, will include features that literally turn your WordPress blog into a listings manager while keeping applications separate in order to preserve your options and advantages.

I’ve made countless posts in forums and blogs that the importance of bridging is vastly superior to integrating because applications can be maintained separately yet work with one another to make the end solution easier to maintain. This rework of the free plugin will bring in a pair of very important features above and beyond what was previously planned. A new login panel will be built as an inline code element to display on any page and can be easily added to a sites sidebar for cross link building and the addition of session bridging between each application has already been added but NOT for the front end users. These two new features and the new user defined template layout will make this plugin sing for WordPress users. Did I mention that this plugin as with ALL of my WordPress and OpenRealty plugins is 100% FREE.

What plugins and snippets are available right this minute.

Featured Listings Anywhere
Listings Details Slide Show (similar to smoothies but FREE!)
Print Friendly PDF
WordPress Featured (has been available for months)
WordPress Listings Rotator
Page Peel for OpenX (not updated to the latest OpenX yet, sorry, busy schedule)
Joomla 1.0.15 External Modules
Joomla 1.5 Native EZProRealty Component (Works 100% Release 1.0)
WordPress Menu Manager (Works 100%)
Joomla / WP latest Posts (Works 100%)
OpenRealty Featured Listings Manager, FREE but Beta
AWBS Template Kit (Not updated to current release but available none the less.)
OpenRealty Dreamweaver CS3 Extension.
WordPress Dreamweaver CS3 Extension.
WP / OpenRealty registration bridge snippet
WP / OpenRealty search results content snippet

If its not listed above then its either BETA or not ready for release. So where exactly are all these free tools? Well spread out a little for many reasons but ANY OF THE ABOVE can be requested from me by email or by visiting the project sites associated with each of our plugins.

EZ Pro Realty Addons

Posted on October 6, 2008
Filed Under Real Estate News | 1 Comment

Core enhancements to EZProRealty

EZPro Realty is at beta 2 and the full release candidate is scheduled for this coming weekend. Although countless delays over the past 8 weeks have prolonged the release of this OpenRealty variant, the wait is well worth it given the projects inclusion of many key features that make it a truly professional application. Here is a quick summary of the features to date;

XML Data Feeds
Entirely new default templates
Featured Listing MooSlider
Featured Listing Flash Slide Show
Listing Details Flash Slide Show
Agents Other Listings
Featured Listings Anywhere WP Plugin
Featured Listings Anywhere Joomla Plugin
Featured Listings Anywhere Code Snippet
Google Maps
Search Results Google Maps
Listings Import / Export Utility
Hi Slide Plugin that includes captioning
Remote Images Path Configuration
SQL Menu is integrated
Literally dozens of design enhancements
News Articles via WordPress
PDF Print Friendly Pages
PDF Print Friendly Search Results
New Search Forms and a new feature that reduces server load on searches

WordPress Realty

Now that EZProRealty is being released its finally time to push these products as a real estate websites top solutions given their open source license and countless features. Realtors have long wanted to move away from proprietary solutions costing them tens of thousands of dollars but haven’t had many options for doing given the turn key products available, often where support is limited. With Joomla, WordPress, OpenRealty among other open source applications lack of options and poor support is a thing of the past. My own FREE WordPress Realty is fully tested and working like a charm and after I finish up documentation ready for download.

WordPress Realty (not to be confused with the domain that was registered by someone on 22-Aug-08) is one of my favorite FREE products that is available now. The WP Realty (for short) plugin takes OpenRealty and puts it directly into your WordPress blog as a fully integrated SEF friendly solution for Realtor bloggers. The plugin takes advantage of sessions to simultaneously log a user into WordPress and OpenRealty at the same time as outlined in this older post. Click on the video link to examine a few features. As mentioned, once documentation is completed I’ll release this plugin and the others 100% FREE.

EZ Pro Realty Joomla Component

Posted on October 6, 2008
Filed Under Real Estate News | 9 Comments

EZProRealty OpenRealty Joomla Component

The EZProRealty component for Joomla is being wrapped up today according to the project developers and the new component is expected to be released as RC-1.0 later this week. The new component although costing several thousand dollars to develop, will be released as FREE WARE for the standard version and a commercial unbranded version will be soon to follow. The commercial version targets developers of Real Estate website solutions by providing three different commercial options each of which is designed to be the absolute most cost effective for developers and end users alike. Developers today told me that once they finish up the content on their target domain and get live demos installed that the component will be released for free download.

EZProRealty is a Joomla 1.5 native compatible component that provides the first ever totally search engine friendly real estate solution for Joomla. The component works with the default OpenRealty installation as well as the alternative development thread known as EZ Pro Realty (an open source fork) without any modification to either core application. The component has been tested with a few of the Joomla SEF extensions available and as stated by developers, the component works best with the SH404 Joomla Extension. The SH404 many would agree is the most complete and effective of those available so its fitting that it works native with this combination.

After careful examination of the admin panel and a few of the features I made a few screen shots of the project which will be posted in a subsequent post related to this product. For now you can look at a few of the screen shots for SEF URL’s and one of the admin panel below.

Joomla Component Screen Shots

Installation of the component follows the standard procedure for any Joomla 1.5 native component but does require the installation of OpenRealty or the variant EZProRealty separately. The developer suggests that OpenRealty be installed as a sub directory application such as /listings/ or /realestate/ or /openrealty/ for instance and that the OpenRealty SEF URL feature be enabled. Once OpenRealty is installed and configured properly, a simple configuration panel is used to get the project production ready as you can see in this screen shot below.

Some of you who have used CMS-Realty may have noticed the unsightly url’s it produces when using it with older versions of Joomla. The developers of this new component examined all the limitations presented in CMS Realty and built EZProRealty as a completely new component using CURL (Client for URLs) and some clever Joomla url rewrite encoding to build the best solution available. Here is what the URL’s look like.

I’ll publish the video I have on this new component once it is released.