Jared Ritchey Blog Reaches 141,000 visits

Posted on November 11, 2007
Filed Under Design, Products | Leave a Comment

Today checking the logs I see this blog has reached 141,000 visits (hits and visits I should say) in just 9 months.

Annoyed at my lack of motivation to complete this site after God knows how many announcements that I would, leaves me embarrassed. 141,000 is a large number of visits that could have been better served had I added and provided what I’ve been promising for eons to provide. It’s like the old story of the shoemakers kids without shoes. We seem to neglect ourselves many times as we work for others and its always been my belief that a customers project comes first above all else.

Well a little hired help is in order so I’m sporting the funds to find a competent PHP programmer to wrap up a series of snippets I’ve had on the books for some time and to invite ANYONE interested in testing my Dreamweaver extensions for bugs to please drop me a line.

Do designers hire designer? Yep as 80% - 90% of all my template designs go to template clubs, sites and other designers who outsource to me on a regular basis. Now however this designer is in need of a designer. I’m looking for people who can quite simply use Photoshop skillfully according to industry standard design parameters to complete a handful of designs for me. Again, email me if you are that person.

Template Monster Conversions - CMS CSS / XHTML

Posted on November 9, 2007
Filed Under Design, Products | 5 Comments

Real Estate - CMS - Joomla - WordPress - Open Realty Template Monster

It seems to be an increasingly popular request by people wanting to take a design they find in a template club or template house and have it converted to function with a CMS. The converting of stock templates from Boxed Art, Template Monster, and other template suppliers into a fully dynamic solution for popular CMS can be a rather complex chore. Many of these template suppliers provide visually attractive designs in largely static variants that are all to often also coded using standards now since expired.

Taking one of these designs and converting it to a valid XHTML / CSS layout then porting the template to work with Joomla, Open Realty, WordPress among others is really a task best suited for the Rapid Template Design Series. This single minded approach assists myself and my partner with the kind of conversion speed necessary to put the RTDS through its paces.

But how much is a conversion to one of these flavors of CMS solutions? Lets look at just three in summary to help you get an idea.

Joomla - Converting templates to XHTML / CSS for Joomla CMS $125+

Joomla as many would agree, is likely the worlds most popular and effectively built CMS solutions available today. What once cost corporations and government agencies tens of thousands of dollars in the past can now be done for a fraction of the cost. What I mean by that statement is that CMS solutions were and quite honestly still are expensive investments. With the availability of applications like Joomla the cost can be reduced and better allocated toward training and features in design that better suit the visitors needs.

Taking a template from one of the template suppliers and converting it is by no means a quick operation as many things need to be taken into consideration. When such requests are asked of us we always recreate the design in XHTML / CSS valid layout prior to porting it to Joomla.

WordPress - Converting templates to XHTML / CSS for WordPress $125+

WordPress stands in my fully biased position as the ONLY blog worthy of attention by serious site owners. I make such a bold statement like that after spending several years working with this marvel of publishing prowess and I have found no application quite like it anywhere on the web.

When serious businesses want to improve market effectiveness many opt in for WordPress. Every single real estate site I’ve ever built that ranked and did so well, did so because of WordPress. I can go on for hours on the ways we achieve this but very few words would articulate what WordPress is prepared to provide out of box.

The simple fact is no one wants a site that looks like someone else’s (carbon copy that is). So many times we take clients Photoshop concepts or templates from a variety places and convert them to work with WordPress after XHTML / CSS validation is achieved. The powerful benefits in the RTDS makes this possible for a fraction of the cost of a custom design and reduces turn around to an afternoon in most cases. WordPress template conversions are particularly suited to my field of expertise.

Open Realty - Converting templates to XHTML / CSS for Open Realty $125+

Open Realty is one of the premier Real Estate Listing Managers available today. One of the difficult things that has troubled Open Realty site owners is the lack of good quality templates at turnkey prices. Custom designs begin on average at $350 and quickly go up depending on integration and features.

Using the RTDS with client provided designs reduces costs to well below $200 on average. Frequently I encounter people who wish to have an attractive template monster design converted to operate with Open Realty. I’m happy to say that in the three years I’ve been building templates for Open Realty I’ve only encountered two designs that could not be effectively converted. Some designs are simply better suited for CMS systems like Joomla with an Open Realty Integration.

Open Realty Joomla WordPress Integrated - Converted templates as XHTML / CSS $425+

Not yet in my product list, the conversion of a commercial template from a template club to an integrated solution is by no means a simple procedure. However with the code snippets we use for integration we are able to bring together truly impressive designs in a valid XHTML / CSS solution to site owners at a fraction of the cost of full blown custom coding.

Feel free to contact me with questions regarding templates you are considering for conversion.

Word Press - Open Realty Integration

Posted on October 26, 2007
Filed Under Design, Portfolio, Products, Real Estate News | 6 Comments

Open Realty and WordPress Integrated Script

Realtors know that a blog can make or break a website and more often than not blogs are being used to break the plateau and barrier with greater ease as a result of blogs.

Realtors would love to have a blog that also featured listings from their featured listings section of their site, many of which use Open Realty. Well now thats possible with the use of some of our proprietary methods for integration that gives Realtors true power in having featured listings displayed within tier blogs via a truly integrated method in design and function.

WordPress to Open Realty - Open Realty to WordPress - Starting at $49.95

The RTDS (Rapid Template Design Series) has been my personal pet project for more than two years and after hearing all the rhetoric, the back talk and other na sayer attitudes I’m happy to say that this very lofty project of mine is nearing its long overdue completion. I’m a Photoshop instructor almost full time during the week now and one of the most rewarding aspects of the RTDS is the speed in which fundamental elements of design can be applied.

Because of the near completion of the RTDS I’m eager to test some of the fundamental characteristics in a production level environment like never before by doing custom conversions for WordPress and Open Realty templates at turnkey prices.

WordPress Real Estate Listings Manager - Open Realty

8 months ago I hired tasked my PHP Coder to complete the WordPress Real Estate Listing Manager to be a free WordPress plugin for Realtors. Happily, and after completion I released exactly 17 copies for beta testing, which puzzling as it was, I NEVER heard a single peep back regarding the functionality and features. Still installed on my LiveDemoSite.com site, I feared the worse for the plugins success combined with a busy work schedule I put the plugin on the back burner. However as things change and schedules get shuffled so to does my priorities and after completing literally dozens and dozens of site design integrations with Open Realty, Joomla and WordPress its time to divvy up an alternative solution. The RTDS gave me motive to provide a way for Realtor and Real Estate blog owners to have featured listings and listing details displayed effectively with their blogs.

Although the WordPress Real Estate plugin isn’t dead in my project inventory, it does need some serious rethinking to figure why I received no feedback from beta testers. Maybe they were just curiosity seekers or even competitors! ? But, the project will be re-examined in the coming weeks for repositioning. Not intended to replace the Open Realty WordPress method I’m so fond of, the plugin was really designed for an individual that may feature their own listings.

So on we go, Real Estate WordPress options exist in the form of a clever set of code snippets and integration methods I’ve used on dozens and dozens of sites with great success. If the objective is to have a blog while maintaining an assortment of featured listings to be displayed then send me an email for a fast quote. As I said, this service will start out at $49.95 which is a drop in the bucket when considering alternative options.

FREE OsCommerce Templates

Posted on October 22, 2007
Filed Under Portfolio, Products | Leave a Comment

Free standard osCommerce Templates easy to modify

Cleaning out my old project directory I discovered that I did in fact have about a half dozen good quality foundation templates for osCommerce MS2 and what I’ve done is install the latest MS2 version over on the LiveDemoSite.com to test them and I’m going to release them FREE.

These templates are NOT super beautiful, a bit heavy, and quite honestly won’t work if you have modified your osCommerce Core. This is one of the biggest reasons I admire the STS and BTS template features in some versions of osCommerce like oscMax, CRE Loaded and so on. Modification to templates in osCommerce requires so much time and energy that it frustrates nearly every designer I’ve ever worked with or been hired to product templates for. People usually if not always modify or extend the capabilities of their osCommerce sites with contributions that modify individual files many of which are template related. This poses a problem.

So, since I rarely suggest osCommerce templates to existing sites anymore I’m going to publish these as FREE providing you register and select “I Agree” that you understand that these are not intended to be added to existing live production sites as they will most certainly break any site with contributions having been added. These templates are for brand spanking new sites using osCommerce MS2+ and beyond that I can promise nothing.

osCommerce vs osCMax vs CRE Loaded vs Shopping Carts - FREE!

I’m a big fan of osCommerce and suggest it to people almost weekly but my latest passion has been in the area of integration as more and more people are realizing the absolute necessary requirement of SEF and SEO friendly commerce solutions. I absolutely love the iJoomla cart although some things about its functionality with OpenSEF is a bit of a mystery it along with CRE Loaded are likely my two favorites to date. A close second is the cart I use on this very site with WordPress along with XCart and of course osCMax. I’ve never been a big fan of ZenCart only because they seek to achieve way to much in the application.

CRE Loaded Templates vs osCommerce Templates

For speed and ease of templating I always suggest people spend the $10 and get a copy of CRE Loaded. The ease in which a template can be applied makes it worth the investment. Options like those for integration I tend to favor are certainly top on my list, but of the osCommerce flavors available, CRE Loaded and osCMax are by far the easiest to create and maintain various template features for. Integration is achievable as in osCommerce but require a bit more work.

osCommerce templates require substantial modifications to individual files to change the look and or feel of a site on a per page basis. Using some PHP in a BTS template for instance makes this relatively simple providing the site owner also invests in the CRE SEF plugin because some template changes are based on the URL.

All CRE Loaded and osCommerce Templates look alike - Beautiful Designs Not Possible?

Have you ever wondered why these templates all look and behave the same? Take any 50 osCommerce, CRE Loaded and Zen Cart templates, stack them on top of one another, and transparently look through them all. You will discover they are all essentially the same. Same features, same general structure, same general look and certainly the same bulky fat and heavy code. I’ve yet to see one of these actually available in XHTML and CSS compliant formats. The silly thing is that XHTML and CSS compliant is actually possible with some core modifications that neither CRE Loaded or others seem at all interested in. Why then are they so expensive?

The number one motive for me not releasing commercial grade CRE Loaded designs has been as I’ve elated to so many times in forums across the web. Simply “proprietary code” which sets all my commercial designs for clients above and beyond standard turnkey designs. I’ve been very tempted to make available commercial grade CRE Loaded templates with the kinds of features professional online stores deserve but have been unable to really package in a meaningful way a turnkey template solution that would be easy to install for novice users. The simple fact is that most of my CRE Loaded templates require some degree of time consuming modification to work per domain and has kept me from a turnkey release option.

Luckily times change, and I’ve been able to have some new code written that should make configuration relatively easy. I’m not going to promise anything, but will simply say keep your eyes on this blog in the next few weeks as I’m cleaning up and repackaging my CRE Loaded inventory for distribution. What you can expect is anything but carbon copy designs for the hundreds of dollars you normally expect.

FREE Open Realty 2.4.3 Templates

Posted on October 22, 2007
Filed Under Portfolio, Products, Real Estate News | 9 Comments

15 FREE entry level CSS - XHTML templates for Open Realty 2.4.3

I promised over the weekend to wrap up the collection of designs that I had planned to give away on this site and I’ve done just that. IT took me a spank of time to get things to validate after looking again and again at what consistently failed validation had to do with Open Realty’s core but I managed to trick the validators into calling these compliant.

I’ve got some documentation to do to the templates and I’d like to add a snippet or two to make them a bit more interactive and I’ll publish them in my new Joomla install. PLEASE IGNORE my Joomla template as its a bit goofy. I had it in inventory and can’t quite remember where I even got it from but its not my design. Just something I tossed up as I wanted to configure my install.

You WILL be required to register to the site in order to download and I do require email verification. If you feel this is nonsense I’m pretty understanding and you can just toss me an email and I’ll grant you access to the templates. I like to have people register because I’m taking a great deal more time in completing projects for my site than ever before and I’d like to notify people of updates not to mention when people register to my site it boosts my ego by 10 fold. Ego is important.

Thanks for visiting….

Open Realty XHTML Compliant

Posted on October 22, 2007
Filed Under Products, Real Estate News | 1 Comment

Creating Compliant Sites with Open Realty

CSS and XHTML compliance was a bit of a challenge in the early days of Open Realty as much of the hard coded layout had been riddled with very old coding methods. Today however Open Realty has made substantial updates to the quality of its PHP and template engine code by adhering closer to the standards and compliance traditions expected or should I say demanded upon by top design professionals and site owners. Although Open Realty still has some minor changes necessary in order to bring the application to the full XHTML Strict compliance, the application runs a great deal leaner and cleaner than previous versions.

Just a few days ago, I had taken the latest version of Open Realty 2.4.3 and went through each and every file changing code elements that were yet to be modified for proper functional specifications of XHTML Strict compliance. Additional modifications to areas of the application where I added a collection styling rules that provide more flexibility and control over the styling of websites. Albeit not a fork by any means, these changes were done for the most part in an attempt to revamp and expand the possibilities of using Open Realty as a stand alone application for things other than a Real Estate script.

The struggle with XHTML or CSS compliance was largely on a per project bases as many designers experienced which had been my motive for maintaining what I’ll call the “production version” of the Open Realty. I frequently do this with applications I work with where I usually correct or modify them to meet design needs. Open Realty seems oblivious to suggestions I make so I feel compelled to release something to assist other designers with similar frustrations.

Open Realty has done a great job with its addon system and it stands to reason that expansion and inclusion of other applications can be achieved to certain degrees with the addon system as it currently exists. This however is not an answer to all situations and nor should it be. Having worked with a great number of integration projects where blogs, cms, crm, mls and idx are used, most integrations have been through direct modification of core files in Open Realty. After looking at this for some time I realized that most of these things could be easily achieved with simple template modifications and some PHP code. Its a hassle to continually update an application that has been modified and as each successive release of Open Realty changes often drastically, the task can be cost prohibitive. So, I’ve come up with a solution that meets the objective of designers and site owners at the same time.

Granted some things in Open Realty do require core modifications still to this day in order to bring it XHTML compliant but these changes are trivial and can usually be done in minutes with Dreamweavers bulk find and replace feature. Seeking out every instance of <b></b> and replacing it with <strong></strong> is a simple task. Having done this many times with those tags among others has become a bit of second nature with every release I keep in inventory. But integration is an all together different animal and having modified the core enough times to not like it, I decided to simply make most integration requests I encounter via a few global control files and some PHP in the actual templates.

Open Realty is loaded with most the code people would need to make it dance, roll over, and beg on demand, its just a matter of getting to it. Use of the addon system is the prescribed method and most commonly used for things people wish to achieve programatically. This however isn’t required and can actually slow down a site substantially.

Since we are lucky that Open Realty allows the parsing of PHP in the template files we have a good deal of control with the functionality of the website which makes integration at the template level a great deal faster and less demanding on resources than using the addon system. As mentioned above the addon system is well thought out and a great deal leaner than previous releases but may be overkill for some very basic tasks like echoing the number of listings in a link to say, residential properties or maybe displaying google maps using the google API. Google provides enough code necessary to work cleanly with Open Realty without the need to create an addon to display a map for a particular property on the listing details page. Having done this among other things with the template structure, it becomes obvious that the speed in a site can be greatly increased by use of this technique.

Open Realty 2.4.3 Administrative - Admin Template

I’ve released a new XHTML compliant administrative template based entirely on CSS rules that have been tested and work well. I’ve included a few configuration files that gives site owners the power to adjust and modify the admin section of their Open Realty site to such a degree that maintenance and control of their site as a whole becomes much easier. The idea behind these modifications is to create an admin panel that works well across commercial as well as personal websites. Image is everything sometimes and a well organized administrative panel can lend a great deal to the perceived quality of an application. Since the template requires the admin.inc.php file to be modified its not likely you will want to use this template in your standard release version of open realty. I will however create a modified version of the template before I publish them to the site for download later today.

Should you decide to use the full version of the template then making a backup of your admin.inc.php file is advised before you upload the modified version. Options was the name of the game at the request of many clients so I’ve created a few unique features that you can chose to use or not to use at your discretion.

I’ll first get these applied to an assortment of my client sites before publishing them for download. Successive releases will be maintained as Open Realty continues with its development. A guide on how to bring the application to full XHTML compliance and a list of changes made to the admin.inc.php file are well documented.

Dreamweaver extensions for template design

Posted on September 22, 2007
Filed Under Design, Products, Template Design Kit | 1 Comment

How to eat an elephant! Tackle giant projects one bite at a time.

Its been a while since I wrote in my blog, taking on the challenges of getting the balance of the features completed for rapid theme and template development proved way more daunting than I had estimated. For years I’ve followed the same routine in design, MLS integration, and development of sites that hover around the open source cms solutions so popular today. Early on as I had mentioned in previous posts, the RTDS was designed to optimize a routine that makes mundane and redundant tasks almost instant. The idea naturally is to take things that are common to nearly all projects and group them into drop in solutions. When you get handed the task of eating an elephant, the notion you can do it in one or even a few bites would prove itself futile.

The way you eat an elephant is piece by piece in manageable sizes. Maybe this isn’t the best way to articulate a point, but as you read it may become a bit more clear because in our business each project can be as large as an elephant and just as intimidating. By creating the collection of Adobe Dreamweaver Extensions for template design (many to release GNU / GPL) I approach an elephant with a different mindset unlike other extensions I’ve evaluated. I spent a spank of time, energy and even money to evaluate the logic behind the approach of dozens of extensions. After many weeks of evaluation, I came to realized that NONE of the extension I evaluated followed standard design processes and even more interesting I found that most were basically a collection of code snippets designed for one click inclusion. It seemed to me that it was un-necessary for an extension to be built this way as most design professionals I have ever worked with maintain a Microsoft Access Database with their code snippets or they invest in tools like CodeWarehouse or SnippetBox to store their code. Dreamweaver is beautiful when it comes to storing snippets and managing common features but experience has demonstrated its not always the ideal.

If you take by example that I do no fewer than 25 - 45 WordPress, Joomla, or Open-Realty installs and configurations on a monthly basis it would be easy to conclude that I had little time for anything else. Each of these products requires an investment in time and certainly a lofty inventory in resources that can only be acquired with experience and time. What I’ve encountered more often than not is that each installation is pretty much the same as far as my plug-in inclusions and general setup configuration, so it becomes easy to spot the first hurdle in effectively maximizing time and project management. Individually, with modifications most of which are common, along with the install and configuration of SEF and SEO features, many times people ask how I can do so much for so little as my average price is just $25 per install. The answer to that is simple. I break things down into logical steps and maintain an accurate and up to date inventory of drop in solutions. This technique is not to different from the one I teach about in the RTDS for project design management. As a design professional, working any other way given the volume of projects we turn would prove extremely difficult if not impossible to maintain while still trying earn enough to pay programmers, hosting and other bills to stay in business.

I have no desire to work for $1 an hour and competing with foreign coders and designers, many professionals in the US, UK, Canada, Western Europe, and Australia struggle to stay in business as many times pricing is so cheap one has to wonder how its possible to avoid that very $1 an hour situation. For this reason among many others I created these Adobe Dreamweaver extensions and built a Code Freelance Open Bidding System for professionals who require a bit more CA$H. I’m not presumptuous or arrogant enough to attempt to limit the use of these solutions to only the west. I’m no bigot and for this reason, these Adobe Dreamweaver Extensions are freely available for ALL professionals regardless of nation. These Adobe Dreamweaver Extensions for template design are effective in reducing the mundane and tedious steps for effective layouts hopefully increasing your income as you can achieve more with less. As I mentioned above, most extensions I’ve evaluated were basically one click snippet inclusions which can certainly be time savers, but did not follow any particular design process. These extensions follow a design process as old as the print design process which includes the use of a grid system.

Now that my coder has gotten things wrapped up in the extensions I’ll update a section of my site so you can download, evaluate, bug test and freely use. Currently available are Open-Realty, Joomla 1.0.12+, WordPress and CRE Loaded with osCommerce, vBulletin and Joomla 1.5 soon to follow among others. Free is free and its my intention to keep them free.

Note: These extensions require a minimum of DreamweaverMX to work properly. Tested in versions MX, 8 and 9.

Moving to Missouri - The Brokers Edge

Posted on September 4, 2007
Filed Under Design, Portfolio, Products, Real Estate News | 3 Comments

Joomla / OpenRealty / WordPress Websites are all ranking high

I’m excited about some of my the discoveries I have so passionately invested energies into. Its one thing for a person to draw conclusion and theories about search engine optimization having little or no experience as I so often see today being played out in forums on the subject. But its an entirely different thing to test, harbor, covet and experiment with techniques first hand that lends so much to a collection of winning formulas giving someone the ability to say that what they do isn’t just half wit theory, but something that actually works.

For nearly a year now I’ve planned on moving to Missouri where the offices of The Brokers Edge are located and have held off mainly because the UltimateIDX was in its third beta nearly ready for production release. Well with a renewed teaching contract and the UltimateIDX in production status, a brick and mortar office with a desk with my name on it calls to me.

Being an instructor, writer and freelance designer, my office gets to follow me around most the time as I pack my laptop to and from the college as well as meetings related to what I do. Teaching Photoshop or writing course ware is a fond passion as is design in general but The Brokers Edge presents an opportunity for me to do all three and never skip a beat. But this really fits in when I considered much of the information myself and Mark has been tabulating so it makes logical sense.

Today after confirming that better than 80% of my serious clients (those that take the internet serious) all rank in the top 10 for their search terms, I built a portfolio I had in standby ready to present these gems. Sometimes I wonder if It’s by luck or the grace of god that I’ve never had two clients in the same market for the same industry. I am just not sure how I would represent two competing sites with search engine optimization effectively. Thankfully The Brokers Edge has a formula that apparently works doing just that. Looking down my list I found that client websites I’ve built and or migrated from Advanced Access or Agent Image for example now rank #1 - #10 consistently and the tools we used were Joomla, OpenRealty, and WordPress. Granted severe hacks to OpenRealty were required to achieve this but they none the less work.

So why do I say “serious clients” other than the obvious? In the time I’ve been doing this business it still surprises me that a person would either not take the internet serious for Real Estate or when they do, they simply pay so much money to have me develop a site only to sit on it and let it do nothing but age. Aging a site is a good thing, sitting on it untouched is a bad thing. Serious Realtors, those that know, understand that according to the national averages, nearly ALL (80% - 90%) home purchases begin with searches online. Why then let a site sit stagnant?

Last Thursday I got a phone call from such a client that owns a site in Utah that I developed with the triplicate solution (Joomla - WordPress - OpenRealty) more than 18 months ago. Today I still see that the site has never received a PR and never indexed for a single term because the 9 agent blogs I built were simply NEVER used and the content is as old, cut-n-paste stagnant as can be. Tragic really because the energy that went into the site to provide the Turn Page Flash Real Estate Gallery, Real Estate Document Management, Online RTF document generator (custom mind you), an Integrated Innova Studio WYSIWYG editor with a half dozen content layout templates that should have made publishing a snap. Features is what the site was all about yet inactivity again demonstrates what we have long known. More on that later.

So, moving, I think that The Brokers Edge will give a nice central place to display the technologies in real world demos that articulate the finer points of good seo readied sites. Guided navigation, Title Tags, URL’s, relevant content, and the list goes on. When a Realtor considers that the cost of developing a triplicate solution like I so frequently write about using all these tools for well below a $1,000; it makes it a real hard argument to justify proprietary solutions that so many often jump right into. Had it not been for the up sell on established length and name recognition, more people, not just Realtors, would jump on this because it works and it GIVES YOU CONTROL. Besides, when you couple this with The UltimateIDX which was designed and developed to work with ANY real estate site on a LAMP server and provide CRM (client resource management) features along with Multiple Listing Service data directly into the Realtors site, this IS a total solution. It WORKS with Joomla - Open Realty - Word Press and nearly a dozen other open source CMS solutions and sites. I’ll keep you posted.

CRE Thumbnail Generator

Posted on August 20, 2007
Filed Under Design, Portfolio, Products, Real Estate News | 2 Comments

Frustrating to see templates I design break because end users upload an image that just blows the sides out of a design. With all CRE Loaded templates I deliver I always include the user guide on standards and formats to administer the site with efficiency. The problem with the CRE Loaded feature for managing image sizes is that it can distort the clarity and quality of your image while doing NOTHING to optimize the images.

One thing that always frustrates end users and store owners is the inconsistent sizes of image that they use in CRE Loaded makes their store look cheap and un professional. CRE Loaded does have an automatic sizing feature but most store owners that maintain commercial sites do editing of images offline. Why, because people gravitate and expect patterns they can gain comfort in. Nothing says crappy site more than one with many things in disarray that it confuses users.

So why not just have an image thumbnail generator that simply takes your image file, and generates the three sizes necessary for product listings? Well this generator does just that; the user can define the width or height variables, the prefix for the file, ie “small_”, “medium_” “large_” and maintain consistency in image sizes for all product listings.

The nice thing about using this method for custom prefixes is that when a person has a product image for say, a Dell Laptop Computer — dell_laptop.jpg the prefixes will generate sized images that are easily identified for size format. The images become small_dell_laptop.jpg, medium_dell_laptop.jpg, large_dell_laptop.jpg or any prefix user defined of course. I mean you could easily make your prefix im_a_tumble_weed_ resulting in an image with the name im_a_tumble_weed_dell_laptop.jpg

This script is NOT a contribution that goes into CRE Loaded primarily because I wanted to keep it external for use with ZendCart, osCommerce and other applications that require such things. Specifically for store and cart systems that do not have sizing options like CRE Loaded does.

FREE for use on my site and a mere $5 to have the feature on yours creates a valuable time saver.

WordPress Real Estate Listing Manager

Posted on August 20, 2007
Filed Under Portfolio, Products, Real Estate News | 9 Comments

Remember this one. My programmer had built and we beta tested the WordPress 2.2 Listing Manager for Real Estate sites and Brokerages but never released it. Well today its back on the project block of things to do in September even though our new code makes WordPress work beautifully with listings in a way I’ll reveal later.

I charged my coder to do three things before we call it a “Real Estate” plugin for WordPress. I told him that I wanted the new modifications to feature custom fields and to have it so I can have three versions on my site for FREE download under three different names. Minor changes will naturally justify the three names as I want to approach three types of blog genera with this script.

I’m going to call the three versions; “Real Estate Listing Plugin” , “Automotive Listing Plugin” and “Photo Classifieds Gallery” since this plugin is really only a gallery plugin to begin with. The main difference is the fact that it is a gallery script that the display of gallery items are fully customizable and additional details and elements can be added by the blog owner. Search abilities are naturally a key feature as are PERMALINKS for SEO friendly links.

I hate delays more than anything but sometimes priorities shift and I’m forced to make drastic changes to keep up with obligations. I certainly hope I can get this to you before I grow old.

Until then, happy blogging.

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