OpenRealty Flash SlideShow

Posted on October 14, 2009
Filed Under General | Leave a Comment

Only a moment to drop in and make mention of the update, the SlideShow we built for OpenRealty is now featuring an admin panel for configuration. I’m also adding in a few parameters that allow you do different transitions. There will also be a new feature to allow for easy activation or deactivation of the SWFObject.js. Too many people have sent me an email saying that their site already has the SWFObject.js in the header area of their site and calling it twice causes issues. So it will be a checkbox option, it will either render or not render based on your preference.

The existing download is the old one so just check back later for the new one this weekend. I’m going about redoing all my OpenRealty addons one at a time for newer features, cleaner code and just overall better functionality.

WordPress Real Estate Plugin 2.0-Beta-1

Posted on October 14, 2009
Filed Under General | 7 Comments

I was seriously off by almost 10 days on the target release for the version 2.0 product. Once we opted to include new features for open house and a new database structure it killed the time frame substantially. So what we decided to do this morning is wrap up enough of the code to make it available and then follow up with success updates as we add features. I will post a link, details and additional important information on the site first thing in the morning and you are free to download and test it.

WordPress IDX and RETS MLS data in your blog?

Today, the staff is putting the new plug-in in 4 client sites to be used as examples to demonstrate that these WordPress blog owners do in fact have MLS listings in their sites. The markets the team chose were those that had competitor solutions Realtors and agents have been eager or almost desperate to migrate away from. These markets include Denver Colorado, Phoenix Arizona, the SOCAL market, Myrtle Beach SC, and Florida. BAREIS (The Bay Area of California) and North Texas NTREIS will be in subsequent builds. These are live sites, not just those loaded with demo data for the sake of the plug-in.

Can you put MLS Listings into your WordPress blog? The answer is yes.

WordPress Real Estate Plugin

Posted on October 7, 2009
Filed Under Real Estate News, Real Estate Websites | Leave a Comment

Competing with Real Estate WordPress Plug-ins and Solutions?

Who is interested in having a Real Estate listings manager plugin for WordPress? According to all the contact queries we have received between 5 blogs and two forums suggests that theme developers and solution providers occupy the majority. After reviewing all the contact requests we have received, it was truly surprising to find that almost half of those who queried the availability, license and terms of use regarding our new plug-in were actually people in the business of building Real Estate websites or themes for the industry. So what I did was conduct about 5 hours of stat tracking and google searches to determine where the interest (or concern) had motivated a peak in requests in just 30 days times. What I discovered was even more of a surprise than I had expected.

After looking at the results of my research for real estate and WordPress related things, as expected, I ran into the usual clutter and “reff-raff” of pointless results. Mixed right in with all the keyword spammers and misleading advertisements I discovered that it was a pretty evenly disbursed amount of service providers for Real Estate website development and theme design with a few interesting twists. Reviewing they days bookmarks and what I had penned in my spiral bound notepad revealed a few interesting things.

I discovered that there is at this very moment (October 6th 2009) 11 separate efforts to build a WordPress Real Estate plugin and or WordPress related integration feature of sorts. Of those 11 I found, I can easily identify 4 of the projects as being initiated by theme developers and 2 as solution providers whom I’ve worked with in the past. One of these solution providers is a very well known company and is a late bloomer in the WordPress for Real Estate solution mix. The last half dozen are for projects on a small level that seek to integrate listings features into their theme options panel among other things. But what does all this mean?

Many of the people that have contacted us I can easily spot as those who have bid on projects in the freelance forums and want to take a look at what we have in order to deliver on their bid. Its not an unusual thing, it happens quite frequently according to some and I’d tend to agree with the assessment of others, that many projects being built for freelance code projects are built from modified solutions that already exist. So, I answered many emails with the same general promise even though it was prior to me really putting it together that many of these contacts were in fact seeking to develop a similar solution. I’m glad I was right in concluding that we should make this available without complex restrictions and licenses.

In answer to many email questions, you CAN use this in your commercial solutions and projects. You do get to have the 3.0 upgrade when it becomes available in February or March. Additionally we do provide good foundation themes which I’ll expand on below.

Please RELAX! We support developers with all of our plugins.

There isn’t a single plugin or addon I publish that isn’t built with the end user in mind. The same is true of my plan from the start that theme developers and other design professionals would like to use these products without complex license or royalty fee requirements. The WordPress Menu Creator is now distributed in about 15 different themes at last count with 3 of them using custom code we put together for the theme developer. I can confidently state that of all the projects I co-develop and or co-publish, all of them are built for easy integration and distribution with third party theme developers and solution providers. We publish 33 plugins and addons currently between The UltimateIDX, Ritchey Web Services, Click Once Computing, Pro Marketing Group, EZPro Realty and IDX Web Solutions with our latest edition being for eCommerce. But you may be asking what does distribution entail? If you build themes or you provide a solution to your clients or you are simply an end user as in the case of a Realtor, car or boat dealership, or maybe even a classified ads publisher, then the plugins and addons we develop can be used in your projects without complex licensing requirements with only one exception.

Paid Support for Plug-ins and Themes

Its not just a casual trend anymore to see that so many GNU / GPL code developers are gravitating toward a paid support method to further the development of their free products. It makes perfect sense in fact if you take notice that many of or should I say the majority of open source projects sit for long periods of time unaltered and rarely updated. By providing commercialized support a plugin developer can achieve two primary things. The first is that support is given to users who are not just curiosity seekers which makes for a more professional forum. Second, it drives the development.

What will this new WordPress Plugin offer for the theme developer or solution provider? What will paid support include and what can be expected?

  • Royalty free use in your projects and solutions. We already do this with all of our freely available plugins.
  • Royalty free use in your theme packages. (more about this on WPRealty.org)
  • Paid support gets you many things at a professional level in response to your support needs including those things hosting related.
  • Paid developer licenses gets you a fully unbranded version. Many projects have branding and link backs which you can opt out of by various conditions, so to is this plugin but we made it super easy and affordable.
  • Paid support also extends to supporting commercial themes such as StudioPress, iThemes, Thesis, Gorilla Themes among others. Its like a one stop shop for support for all those commercial themes in one easy to manage location.
  • Paid support gets access to plugins and extensions not GNU/GPL available. Many are in fact being sold elsewhere for $200 – $300, with one of the paid support solutions you get them free.

Similar Post.

IDX RETS for WordPress Update

Posted on October 2, 2009
Filed Under Real Estate News, Real Estate Websites | 24 Comments

The IDX / RETS WordPress Plugin Release is running about three days behind the target release date as it’s looking more like Monday and possibly Tuesday for first release. We are doing work with a few Realtors who opted to be our Beta Testers but its only for bug hunting.

What caused the release date delay? Well its nothing serious, we wanted to make sure that the actual plugin did not conflict with other plugins and during our test we found a conflict with the NextGen Gallery and there were a few permalink quirks that needed hashing out. Since some plugins make global calls to things like jQuery, there has been a few conflicts with the registration module and the Google Maps feature. One of the nice features about this plugin is the way it automatically ties in your registered users to for your blog in order for them to automatically be designated as potential clients for the purpose of seeing special listing features and the ability to bookmark properties. This is done so people do not have to take some sort of secondary action if they are already members of your blog. I’m sure its a feature you will appreciate if you have an existing blog with members.

Anyway, good plugin development would not attempt to use exact paths based on a presumed folder structure or bother to hard coded inclusions of things that are already in the WordPress core. Because so many plugin developers do just that it has caused a little issue with our admin panel so we have been working to fix it.

Demo of the IDX / RETS empowered WordPress Plugin?

Yes, having received a handful of requests for this I’ll say that there is one, but! Only upon request can I send you the link and password at this point. Because the MLS “demo data” is in the site we are required to NOT make it public. Each MLS is different, some don’t bother to provide demo data but when they do they like the data to be for development purposes only. Well, most the time. So although we have a new data tester for your use as well, at this time until the first of the week, we are stuck with the data example we have.


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