US Government Uses WP Guides

Posted on September 30, 2009
Filed Under Announcements, Products | 3 Comments

I’ll admit, part of doing the things we do in design and publishing of plugins and addons has a little to do with ego. Sometimes it has a lot to do with ego and when people use your plugins, or even redistribute them in their themes and templates it confirms that you did something important enough that others found value in even if it is just utility value. But when a government agency uses your plugins, to me, its worth boasting about and making a big deal of even though its not likely anything truly unique. I’m certain that given all the fine plugins and themes produced by WordPress professionals the world over that their works are also found valuable enough to be taken serious by agencies and even companies to use.

In the email I received from this .gov agency, there was a single question along with a suggestion of sorts and a kind request for help. It seems that WP Guides serves its purpose ideally for distributing documents to the writing staff of this federal office in charge of antiquities and monuments. The suggestion they sent was to have Guides provide an easy way to upload documents or other materials in order to make using it easier. They ask if WP Guides would ever have this feature and if not could it? In short I answered, yes!

I take feedback serious and It has been part of the plan from the beginning to extend this a great deal but as with all plugin and addon development time is money given the workload we manage. Planning the updates for WP Guides does fit into the schedule as its second on the list right after WP Realty 2.0 and prior to WP Realty 3.0 with the following planned tasks I’ll list below. Before however I’ll reiterate the purpose behind the development of this small simple plugin.

Why Did I Create WP Guides?

In many previous posts and forum discussions I have explained that the reason we produced WP Guides initially was two particular types of projects. The first was for a redesign of a school district website and the other was to provide affordable means of distributing documentation to real estate clients in order to teach them how to blog. Support can be expensive and WP Guides is perfect for distributing guides and tutorials to those who have access. Next, I really wanted guides to be used by web developers, blog masters, theme developers and other professionals who want to distribute documentation with their projects. So here is the list of what is in store in the next release.

WP Guides Features in Next Release.

After wrapping up the WP Realty 2.0 and getting the coders started on the WP Realty 3.0 we will add several new features to WP Guides. As it stands this day, September 29th, 2009 we are only about one or two days from completing WP Realty 2.0 and will begin the update changes to Guides. Here is what we have planned.

WP Guides will feature a one click opt in for remotely hosted guides and video tutorials on a tutorial website being built.
Folder creation and upload features restricted to the current array of media formats. This will allow admins to upload files from the admin panel.
Provide user level access settings for members, administrators, authors. Necessary for WP MU enhancements.
Provide user level inclusion of RSS feeds in the guides panel. This is being added because of my own use of Guides. I like to follow various sources on the web for news and other things of interest when working in my WordPress blogs. This feature will allow users to have their own inventory of RSS feeds in their admin panel.
It will most certainly have a new interface which will mimic the one we did for WP Realty 2.0.
It will likely have more support for private branding in this next release but may not make it until the subsequent release shortly there after. From the beginning its always been my goal to make sure that guides could be easily included into blog projects for webmasters to distribute and provide their own documentation, style guides and support files.
Some additional basic admin configuration settings. Nothing fancy but things that will make it better for use in WP MU projects.

WordPress Menu Creator Updated

Posted on November 20, 2008
Filed Under Products | 12 Comments

Wordpress Cascading Drop Down Menu Manager

I managed to break free for 30 minutes and wrap up a small bug in the WordPress Menu Creator. As it stands we are at version 1.0.2 which is only a maintenance release to fix some issues when using widgets in conjunction with the menu manager.

Version 1.0.3 is actually the one I’m most eager to see production ready as we are adding in a jQuery feature that allows you to change the sort order of menu items by simply dragging the field to the position you desire. I’ll also add in a new feature where it can be used in WordPress MU sites allowing an administrator to deactivate the “DELETE” feature for menus. Several people have reported that when using our product with WordPress MU that some users delete their menu’s causing errors in the rendered template.

The WordPress Menu Creator will also be updated to take advantage of WordPress 2.7 and the automatic update feature now in beta. Chances are we will release the OpenRealty Guides and WordPress Guides at the same time since they share similar core code features for structure and the updates underway will be applied across each of those FREE products.

You can download WP Realty and WP Menu Creator in the WordPress extensions directory. WP Realty was transferred to the EZPro Realty project and WP Menu Creator was developed for The Brokers Edge. OR Menu Creator will also be a free product of The Brokers Edge.

Here is the link on WordPress Plug-ins Directory

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.

Joomla and AWBS Bridge

Posted on April 3, 2008
Filed Under Products | 5 Comments

Joomla – AWBS Template and User Bridge

One of the coolest products I’ve used in the past few years for my servers is the AWBS shopping cart for hosting companies. This tool is exceptionally detailed and efficient in billing for recurring monthly hosting and the ease in which it can be added to a PLESK or cPanel server makes it my number one suggested solution to clients seeking such a package.

Templates in AWBS however are not just a tragic and difficult undertaking for designers they are exceptionally complex and most examples, even commercial ones, are jam packed with countless broken elements and nested tables making them impossible to build truly XHTML / CSS compliant designs. I truly love AWBS but the templates needed help and I avoided it for a very long time because I knew the scale of the project and time it would take would need to be justified somehow. Well I found justification.

AWBS Template Designers Resource Kit

This particular design resource kit is essentially a foundation master template for AWBS using all conforming XHTML and CSS required markup and also includes a few extra open source extras to assist in things like forcing of column length, and ajax loading of some elements using an open source library called DHTMLX.

After spending nearly 4 days cleaning up the code from the default business theme included with AWBS I then used the code elements as a sort of template foundation. Having removed or changed 16,000+ design and layout related elements from the template I was able to get the base template 90% XHTML / CSS compliant as well as reduce the overall template weight to 1/3 the original size.

What I then decided to include was a handful of small snippets that would allow users of Joomla 1.0.12 – 1.0.15 the ability to bridge registrations and to provide a way to control menus in AWBS from within the Joomla admin panel. Naturally this took an Adobe Captivate Video to explain it in better detail how to do this.

That leaves us with a final project or product that includes the following;

AWBS master layout template kit (of sorts) that is XHTML and CSS compliant for the most part.
Dreamweaver snippets I use for the drop in template tags
The JS Library
The Joomla External Modules code and video on how to use
The WordPress inclusion functions called wpglobal.php This allows you to put snippets from your blog in AWBS.
swfobject.js version 2.0 for the flash jpg slide show I have included
3 videos outlining the use of the master layout for building templates.

Released as AWBS Template Kit – version 1.0 – the price is $39.95 and is available now.

WordPress Featured Listings Plugin UPDATE!

Posted on March 26, 2008
Filed Under Products | 3 Comments

IMPORTANT NOTICE REGARDING EMAIL REQUESTS and DOWNLOADS

I PROMISE I’VE GOTTEN EVERY ONE OF THE REQUESTS AND I’M NOT IGNORING YOU. We had to change a very important feature and overlooked potential issue with duplicate listings issues in Open Realty as one of the beta testers discovered. I PROMISE EVERY PERSON THAT SENT ME AN EMAIL; I’ll send you an email this evening with download link and the URL to the brief video instruction guide because I still do not have PDF or printable documentation completed.

I’ve been up to my neck with updating my css-grids system and the Open Realty Dreamweaver Extension update pending the release of Open Realty 2.5 and it has kept me round the clock busy with that and catching up on client projects specifically a shopping cart AWBS project now almost complete.

Side note: I hate using a blog as a thread for notices like this so I’ve finished my new site design and matched the design to BB Press so you I can provide support instead of using this blog and comments for such things. I did finish the final stages of the flash presentation feature in the WP Featured Listings Plugin so you can have an animated flash slide show directly in the featured. I’m sure it will break on some sites because the inclusion of SWFObject.js has proven not to work on two blogs which to this day I’m fully baffled as to why. Anyway thats from beta testers so maybe they should update their blog theme.

THANK YOU SINCERELY FOR YOUR PATIENCE.

WordPress OpenRealty vTiger Bridge

Posted on March 24, 2008
Filed Under Products | Leave a Comment

Open Realty adds Sales Leads to vTiger

Open Realty is a great tool for a listings manager but when it comes to managing clients and or leads no listings manager should venture into that realm. My attitude has always been the same when it comes to integration and the thing I suggest over and over again is BRIDGE, BRIDGE AND BRIDGE DONT INTEGRATE. Integration is rarely a good idea largely because forcing applications to occupy one another can cause all kinds of potential issues and limitations.

Take for example the Open Realty Joomla integration tool known as CMSRealty; Although a good product this tool would not be the ideal method in my professional opinion for making the two applications work together. The greatest reason for such is the very unusable URL structure it produces. However I must also be fair in noting that one of my clients who builds integrated website solutions for his customers recently took #1 place in google and is even showing up as an authority in google and the package they use is Joomla, OpenRealty and WordPress all of which are integrated. To take #1 position in that market for the primary search term lends tons of credibility to CMSRealty, Open Realty and Joomla as a viable Real Estate website solution. WordPress naturally has its contributing role. But lets move on to the vTiger Bridge.

A few weeks ago, Mike ( my programmer ) was working on a project for a person in Great Brittan where they want to manage contacts in vTiger for each of those that register via Open Realty and have those leads automatically added to vTiger which they could then assign to agents and or managers. This project was a rather lofty one in which they wanted to sell properties via estate agents world wide in sort of a world wide property network.

The issue for a project of such caliber using Open Realty is the very limited features in user management that are present and the need for additional features like groups, group ids and group members to be added. Once that hurdle was surpassed the project evolved and surfaced as the ideal Open Realty real estate listings manager / (slash) CRM or client resource manager.

Depending on the final outcome of the project, this could be made available free at some point for those interested in adding sales leads to vTiger. Commercially it’s available now on a per install basis.

WordPress Auto Sales Plug-in

Posted on March 21, 2008
Filed Under Products | 9 Comments

UPDATE: 02/02/2001
My team and I have moved the project to version 3.0 Release for now. What we did to satisfy existing customers and those seeking this application is simply modify the language file for WPRealty in order to have it usable for automotive sites. Please see http://www.wprealty.org for license information. Then contact me directly if you want this installed with the necessary language file for automotive or you can translate it yourself.

Promoting automotive sales with your WordPress Blog

Now that we have the plugin complete for the Real Estate Featured Listings, I tasked and received back from Mike my coder the optional variant titled WP Auto Sales now in final edits. I’ve managed to receive offers (most of them free) from people willing to translate the plug-ins language files and wrapping up the automotive variant keeps things running a bit cleaner since the difference between the two plug-ins is largely wording, the templates included and setup instructions along with some general cosmetics.

So now, the Featured Listings plug-in as it stands has been ported and tested to work with the following applications; Open Realty 2.4+, EZ Pro Realty 2.0, Hot Properties (some bugs related to Joomla), EZ Realty (some bugs related to Joomla) and a raw IDX feed. Plans to make it work with UltimateIDX is right now in the works. What is released as of a few days back is the version that works with Open Realty and EZ Pro Realty.

The new automotive version will include a database dump file for either of the applications and will replace the default wording and language files with those words specific to the automotive industry. Since any and all catalogs (for the most part) are really galleries or gallery related, the option to use pre configured database dumps makes perfect sense considering alternatives.

Open Realty is an excellent product with great potential and with forked variants like EZ Pro Realty which address more specific requirements of the industry, these two applications are always going to be favored in the development of these plug-ins for now.

WordPress Real Estate Featured Listings Plugin

Posted on March 20, 2008
Filed Under Products | 36 Comments

AVAILABLE BY REQUEST!

Okay this is the very last pre release post I’ll make on this I promise. The plug-in is 100% available to anyone who sends me an email via my contact form. Since my site has been re designed I’ve not had time to update all my posts with the new typography features and get the downloads manager installed so by request you can have the plug-in.

New tested features work in WordPress 2.5 for this plug-in

What we added as a feature I know will be beneficial is the use of Open Realty tags directly in the WordPress Featured Listings plug-in. So for example any Open Realty template tag you can use in a normal Open Realty featured listings template you can use in this plug-in. What this provides is this, you can take a featured listings template tag and create a template specific to your objective and have that template with parsed code included directly into WordPress and more so Open Realty and WordPress do NOT need to reside in the same database.

Eager to get some more real site users as opposed to beta testers, each of whom I thank for your valued feedback, support and suggestions. I’d like to see the plug-in on some live sites so I can provide some links as a courtesy to you. Please contact me today and over the weekend to get a copy of this FREE plug-in

Plug-in Translators Needed

Posted on March 17, 2008
Filed Under Products | 2 Comments

The Featured Listings WP Plug-in Translation

We have added a new file and folder in the plug-in for languages and would like to hire translators for 5 paragraphs of documentation. and 22 specific words in the language file. For anyone interested we are looking for the following languages and need to know what your FEE will be for the translation. German, Spanish, French, Italian, Russian and any other languages of interest are welcome. Please use the contact form on my site if you are interested. Although this plug-in is available by request I’d like to make it available with multi-lingual support.

WordPress Real Estate Plugin

Posted on March 15, 2008
Filed Under Products | Leave a Comment

WP Real Estate PLUGIN – WHERE IS IT AT? HOW CAN I DOWNLOAD IT?

A ton of emails and questions led me to make this post rather than answer all the emails. The plugin was completed 10 days ago and beta testing has passed so this is available now. I took it offline to rework the interface and I’ll get it posted with details on the new page specifically assembled for this plugin and the others.

~ Jared

keep looking »