WordPress Realty Plug-in Branding

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

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.

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