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.

CRE Loaded Template Design Dreamweaver Extension

Posted on August 20, 2007
Filed Under Portfolio, Products | 2 Comments

One of the more ambitious products I design for is also one of the most frustrating for new or inexperienced designers. CRE Loaded is a forked variant of osCommerce that was modified to feature some pre installed contributions and then made commercial.

CRE Loaded shares with its parent a rather standard old school early PHP 3 method of templating for presentation. osCommerce as many will note, has been the most downloaded and widely used shopping cart on the internet second to none. As template options like BTS and STS came available, forked versions started to popup beginning with Zen Cart then others that have come and gone. BTS and STS adds a degree of design control that is easier understood and quicker to implement template changes lending a great deal to the continuing growth of each solution.

Why on earth then would a person need to create a Dreamweaver Extension for CRE Loaded? A few minor but relative routine reasons; template design for CRE Loaded is anything but exciting and most if not all the designs people take notice of are as indifferent as the next. Take any 100 or 200 designs you like, stack them on top of one another and peer down into them and you will see that almost all of the stock inventory available are essentially the same. The same features, the same menus, the same navigation types, the same everything but design elements and graphics.

The Dreamweaver Extension includes a few pre defined features that will hopefully change all that. Of all the designs I get contracted to do for osCommerce or CRE Loaded, most if not all of them request the same old run of the mills look and layout that they could easily go to Template Monster and purchase. 90% of all templates I design for either solution are for template houses and template resellers. In recent months I’ve spent a great deal of $$$ redoing my code base and snippet inventory to make some rather proprietary, detailed and fully unique features for future templates. This extension is the result of that.

If a person truly wants to be able to design a template for CRE Loaded or osCommerce and has only basic entry level skills than this extension is the answer. I had planned to release it free of charge and just charge for the tutorials and support elements but after looking more at my design inventory I realized I could be cutting my own thought. When the extension is released it will feature some additional packaged elements along with a few dozen unique feature sets that will likely sell for $40.

I’ll present more details later on some of the elements of the extension.

Page Turn vs Page Peel Flash Effects

Posted on August 20, 2007
Filed Under Products, Real Estate News | Leave a Comment

If you have ever wanted to have a nice high quality page turn effect for your site then look no further. In recent months I’ve invested heavily into the completion of our Page Turn effect which essentially emulates the effects of a turning page.

The difference between a Flash PageTurn (page turn effect) and a Flash PagePeel (page peel effect) is really not a great deal. The underlying code for nearly all page turn and or page peel type snippets stem from a single source. A woman in China named URNAMI was likely the first to publish the solution in the actionscript forums about 4 years ago. Its the source I’ve used and its the source most others use in their projects. Page Flip or Page Turn is the emulation of actual pages as the final rendering looks more like a booklet or magazine for instance. PagePeel or Flash Page Peeling is an effect that emulates the peeling back of the web page to reveal an advertisement or link as you can see in the upper right corner of my site.

Commercial client projects helped fund the development as I have used it successfully on two domains to date and I’m finalizing its introduction into a Real Estate site for online housing and condo guides. Its a truly nice effect given the limited resources for the project.

Two years ago I had actually planned to release a version that would pull its page data into a set of flash files via XML / PHP for use in Open Realty. The idea was briefly abandoned as version changes to Open Realty opened up a few barriers that proved to be a coding challenge. My initial concern at the time was the lofty amount of code that was currently weighing down the addon to make it void of any real practical use.

Well the worm has turned and I’ll be converting this page turn effect to work with database driven applications like Open Realty. I’m not saying database controlled image management or something as trivial as that, I’m saying pulling of listing data and all listing details to be displayed in a turn page document.

The Female Modeling Magazine Site, The CRE Loaded Cart and soon the Real Estate site will be pretty clean examples of how effective this tool can be used. Commercial sites like JC Penny, Victoria’s Secret and IBM have been using such effects on their web sites for two years. People tend to gravitate to the familiar and books and magazines are familiar. This would explain the attraction to its use I’m sure.

I’ll get a demo up this week for you to examine. Chances are most people would want to see the models so I’ll likely publish that one. I’ll then provide a link to the Real Estate site that has the feature effectively employed.

Flash Page Turn Corner Effect

Posted on August 19, 2007
Filed Under Design, Portfolio, Products, Real Estate News | 10 Comments

Flash Page Peel / Page Flip Effect Script:

Our advertising script is the most effective type of page peel or page flip flash effect on the market. Modified to work with a select few open source applications, the page peel advertising rotator is effective in bringing to life advertising options on your domain.

Dont settle for out dated and greatly annoying popup ads and why settle for banner advertising on your site taking up precious real estate that could be used for more productive site features when you can randomize multiple client advertising campaigns with a system that puts the rest to shame.

80% of your ads success depends on one thing.

Its been said by advertising experts that the 80 / 20 rule applies to advertising in a clearly difinitive way that articulates the effectiveness of an advertisement. For each dollar spent, 80% of that dollar is in the headline and 20% in the content body of an ad. Headlines serve one purpose, to draw attention. That being said; can you honestly think of a more effective headline than this Page Peel Flash Effect Script? The answer should be obvious.

Affordable isn’t even the best way to articulate this. How about Dirt cheap pound for pound more effective than solutions costing hundreds of dollars. If $80.00 out of every $100.00 is spent trying to CATCH YOUR PROSPECTS ATTENTION RIGHT NOW with effective CALLS TO ACTION then this tool is as cost effective any can be. My 80% would be to bet on a sure thing rather than throwing darts at a dart board in hopes someone would click my banner.

Rapid Template Design Kit (Photoshop CS2)

Posted on August 19, 2007
Filed Under Products | Leave a Comment

Photoshop Tutorials - Template Design Kit

The Rapid Template Design Series has been my pet project for just shy of three years and now that were close a few small changes have surfaced.

I love surprises and I don’t mind opposition or competition but some times things leave me scratching my head wondering the logic behind some peoples decisions. None the less it looks as if the company we originally selected as the publisher of the course ware apparently can’t get the distributors to agree on our pricing requirements so we may end up self publishing.

Self publishing isn’t anything at all new since its my guestimate that 95% of all web design related courses on the web are self published. Without revealing to much about the project I’ll just briefly say that the cost to publish the font guide, the color theory materials and the other elements isn’t cheap by any means. Our investment to date is nothing shy of a chunk of change. That lent a great deal to the canceling of some private label software that was to be included in the course. So where are we?

CSS Menu Generator Software - CSS Tabs - CSS Cascading Menu

The software I intended on including with the course was developed by a French company and distributed freely which in all honesty I’d love to still use it. It was to be private labeled to fit our course ware, but two little hurdles became major issues with my partners forcing me to decide on a new selection.

What will be included before we self publish is a ground up Windows based application designed for generating CSS Navigation but will feature two very important features that I feel are essential. The first being that you the design student can add your own code elements using an easy to follow XML diagram that will give you your own generator abilities for your custom menus. The next key feature is the browser compatibility checker. IE for Mac is a dead stick and so is IE5 for Windows so these will be excluded from the generator. IE6, the troublesome browser that it is will still be in the checker.

Next on the list is the font program. It looks like the company we have been asking for a private label from has decided that we can distribute their freely available copy as we choose but they declined the proposal to private label the application.

Dreamweaver MXI / MXP Extensions for Template Design

Ok, my favorite part of this entire series is the MXI / MXP Dreamweaver Extensions. I’ve long been a fan of Dreamweaver and the fact that students can buy a student version for $90 in the school bookstore makes it the ideal target for this instructional series. Now as you may have read previously, there are tutorials and introduction videos for applications such as HTML Kit (Freely available) and Adobe GoLive (could be a product of the past very soon) but Dreamweaver is the choice of more designers than any other application on the Windows platform. I’d love to produce HTML Kit versions of these extensions but its not on the top priority list as of yet.

To help fund the project Mark suggested that we release the 5 Dreamweaver Extensions for $5 a piece outside of the RTDS. I’m opposed to the idea for very simple reason. The biggest is the fact that these extensions are currently for FREE applications like WordPress or Open-Realty and it would more beneficial to release them as donation-ware. Not an obligated to donate type release but a freely donate if you feel they are worth it. My current documentation is a sparse crappy little txt file that I will eventually update to the courses existing documentation format.

I’ll just release the following Dreamweaver Extensions.

FREE DreamWeaver Template Extensions

Open Realty Template Design Dreamweaver Extension
Joomla 1.5 Template Design Dreamweaver Extension
Joomla 1.0.+ Template Design Dreamweaver Extension
WordPress 2.2+ Template Design Dreamweaver Extension
CRE Loaded - osCommerce Template Design Dreamweaver Extension (its for both apps)
vBulletin 3.7 Template Design Dreamweaver Extension (not yet in development)

Rapid Template Design Series Release Date

Joomla 1.5 is on its way to being a reality, Open Realty is actively developed by Ryan and his coders and WordPress is a work of art always being updated. All that being said the RTDS must be released this fall quarter because much of the thousands of dollars we have invested are for these applications as they stand now. As in NOW! The above mentioned applications could change enough in the next year to render our existing work useless so time is of the essence and I’ll keep the components of the RTDS upgraded as we go.

Thus the date of the release will still be September (months end) but could be pushed by just a few weeks into October. The release price is yet pending on the publishers final word but we believe it will be as originally announced.

Owners of the RTDS will have never expiring unlimited update access on the products main domain and as updates in course materials or components are made available. THERE COULD BE a fee for shipping some updates as we have mentioned this course is initially delivered to you on a single DVD or 4 CD ROMS along with the printed guides. Supplementals will be PDF docs that can be printed locally.

PHP Snippet Inventory - Rapid Template Design Series Code Inventory

CANCELED! Not going to include the code archive as I originally wanted. It was an after thought to add it in the first place but after taking a tenth pass at the checklist for the components we plan to include we feel it really does very little to the courses central theme. The Rapid Template Design Series is simply a PhotoShop course on all the facets of the design process and techniques related to web and print publishing design. All the other stuff was an after thought designed or included to aid in the learning process. Remember this course is for students not experts of design so we have removed the snippets.

The web design PHP and other coding snippets will however be in a members area of http://www.templatedesignkit.com The nice thing about doing it this way is that we intend on allowing other coders to have free ONE WAY LINKS to their sites from any number of our PR1 - PR4 sites for providing contributed code snippets. Some of the code snippets will be on front street with accommodating articles and or tutorials.

Open Realty Tabbed Navigation

Posted on August 7, 2007
Filed Under Design, Portfolio, Products, Real Estate News, Template Design Kit | Leave a Comment

Tabbed Navigation for Open Realty Templates

People like tabs, they like cascading menus and they like clean styled well organized navigation structures. Using tabs for navigation isn’t all to difficult to do for most things as the markup is widely available and easily implemented. One of my favorite of all tabbed type navigation examples is the one published by A List Apart called Sliding Doors A great static tab set with styling for active states for a satisfying effect. But what if you want to use that same tab set in a dynamic environment where tab and or navigation states are all template based. Meaning the navigation elements are not controlled by the database as they are in say Joomla or other applications. Well I needed an answer to that as well having a serious desire to make a tabbed template for CRE Loaded Pro and here is what we did.

Open Realty and Sliding Doors Tab Navigation

Using a static type navigation set like the sliding doors example is that one particular feature of the tabs for active page isn’t exactly a stock feature in Open Realty. Because of this, I recently took a contribution I released last month for CRE Loaded and converted it to work with Open Realty in a no nonsense kind of way that is exceptionally easy to embrace providing a few of your ducks are in a row and you have properly configured your Open Realty installation.

What I’ve done is simple. I take a small chunk of PHP code and determine the URL of the pages I have matched to my tabs and then dynamically set the active state of that particular tab based on an array. Did I lose you? Well here it is in bare bones basic terms.

If you have a tab set with links like Home, About Us, Contact, etc… and you want the active tab to show active when on the about.html page or any other for that matter then when we edit the tab control file by adding the target landing page to the array and then add the link in the tab and your done. Could it get any simpler?

This little technique then gives you the ability to have a nice active state for pages in a templated environment like Open Realty. I’ve used it with other template engines where pages and or active link options are not provided by the application as you can see in the IDX example HERE. When you download the example or visit the site example you can see that the tabs are set to active on each appropriate page. Before you say big deal dude, how is that a challenge, take and download the sliding doors example from A List Apart and examine the code yourself. This solution will not rock the world but it sure does make an Open Realty template shine with a design that can accommodate a nice tabbed navigation.

You can find the tabs example and basic Open Realty template in the tutorials section of TBE.

Best regards.

CRE Loaded Catalog Images

Posted on August 7, 2007
Filed Under Design, Portfolio, Products, Real Estate News, Template Design Kit | 1 Comment

CRE Loaded Thumbnail Generator

Nothing is more annoying than seeing or hearing about the frustration end users and site owners have with their site after spending a lofty chunk on its development. Although some things are certain to surface almost routinely, many things can be avoided by taking the time to draft well written and clear documentation.

In CRE Loaded projects I almost always provide site owners with a style guide if I have the slightest idea that he / she intend on using the content page features in the cart. Now, all though CRE Loaded comes with a WYSIWYG editor for product listings, it does not come with a logical explanation on how to use it effectively and therein lies the problem I face quite frequently with end users.

CRE Loaded unlike osCommerce provides a way for store owners to add content in a more rich and controlled format, thats the good part. But Its been my long held suggestion to end users to do their publishing of content offline in a professional html editor (commercial or not) primarily because online editors fill your drafts with countless inline elements that can break a layout. In every single one of my commercial sites, I draft the content in MS Word so I can port a version of my article to a PDF and MS Reader for downloads and then I copy that article into Dreamweaver, clean up the messy MS Word markup, validating the structure, then pasting it into the WYSIWYG editor in HTML format. As you can guess my blog is NOT one of those places I do this at. Nothing here validates. (proof positive on another experiment I’ll tell you about later)

Pictures and Content Break My Layout!

So, in CRE Loaded projects and templates I’ve always provided the client with a simple one page sheet on the correct image sizes and a small collection of examples among other things for the editor. In the last month alone I’ve seen only 1 person use a CRE Loaded design I’ve built correctly. Thumbnail images are consistent in size, the popup images are all the same size and product images are all the same size. Its when people try to upload these gigantic images in hopes that they will be sized correctly that problems begin.

Because of this I’ve had the php guy build me three little CRE Loaded generators that I’m publishing free of charge for your use. The main one is a simple image generator that takes the product photo and produces three output sizes based on user variables for either width or height. It will add a nice little user defined prefix to the image and provide some other features that will help CRE store owners to quickly generate consistent photo sizes without the lengthy process of producing them in photoshop.

I’ll write more on this generator and the content validation generators later in the week. Until then, blog like a mad man.

CSS Menus Design Generator

Posted on June 13, 2007
Filed Under Products | Leave a Comment

CSS Horizontal and Vertical Menus

Don’t you wish there was a nice little tool to generate truly valid CSS Menus? Well soon a new application will be freely available on the main Template Design Kit website located at http://www.templatedesignkit.com.

I’ll have more details and screen shots by mid week next week which will feature the better half of 50 different menu types some of which would be generated for Joomla and OSCommerce.

Open-Realty and CRM vTiger

Posted on June 12, 2007
Filed Under Design, Products, Real Estate News | 5 Comments

Integration Bridge for vTiger and OpenRealty

About a year ago I commissioned the development of a bridge between SugarCRM and Open Realty which was received with minimal demand and request at time. Recently however I’ve got that bug again to spend some money and hire a coder to bridge Open-Realty with vTiger using my small inventory of Open-Realty notification and custom form scripts into an all in one FREE package for people to use.

Now as I begin to write more and more on the marketing side of websites for Realtors and such I’ll be suggesting the use of vTiger in many many articles and this bridge tool will be maintained as a result. Granted, the UltimateIDX we have does include some CRM features mainly geared toward persistent tracking and management and conversion of contacts, but vTiger goes beyond to the point of extending an ongoing relationship between you and your prospects.

So with my $350 spent on the coder today (broke again, I hate that) to get this bridge done I explained this in terms an complete novice would understand. A) Make it EXTERNAL from Open Realty entirely. Open-Realty changes way to much for me to maintain an addon that could literally break from one release to the next (a common situation with Open Realty) and B) play well MySQL and Postgre and then C) Should NOT require both applications to be installed in the same database.

I like having my email server on one machine and the web server on another simply for convenience. I know from experience there are people who would host vTiger in once place accessible to employees of a Real Estate agency and the actual site elsewhere. I myself would use that if I were a Realtor. Keep the Real Estate site on its own domain and the CRM in a sub or different domain all together. So unique database connectivity is essential in this package.

Now PRIORITIES are exactly that. This project is taking second place to the WordPress Listings plugin which is to be back in swing before we get completely side tracked and move on to this new project. I’d love feedback and ideas.

Oh yeah! Did I tell you this is FREE?

Real Estate Listing Editor / WordPress 2.2

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

Oh Real Estate Plugin where art thou?

Mark has been up to his neck with finals at the college he teaches at and this has taken serious chunks out of his time as college lets out for the year TODAY! Now he can get back to finishing this plugin so I can make it available FREELY naturally.

I’ll keep anyone posted that has sent an email requesting such. Sorry this blog stinks and doesn’t feature the kinds of things I’ve wanted it to have but the new design is at least twice as good and likely 10 times more user friendly.

« go back — keep looking »