Real Estate Listing Editor / WordPress 2.2

Posted on June 11, 2007
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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.

Fast Web Design Resources

Posted on June 11, 2007
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Rapid osCommerce, CRELoaded, osCMax Templates

Got the letter back from the publishing company and I’m excited to say that final edits for the Rapid Template Design Series are underway and will be on bookshelves by late September of this year. College versions will be spiral bound and bookstore versions will be sold in a software box type collection with videos on two DVD’s and support files on a seperate CD.

I only need permission from about a half dozen people on the web to distribute some of their items in the resource tool and once we have that it goes to production.

I originally wrote about it here http://www.jaredritchey.com/rapid-template-design-series.html

As promised I’ll be publishing a short collection of master layout tools and guides for oscommerce and oscmax but the price will be $39.95 not $10 since I realized some additional tools will need to be added to make the tool effective for new people seeking to design their own custom shopping cart sites.

Free osCommerce Templates

Posted on June 8, 2007
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osCommerce, CRELoaded, osCMax Templates

Okay so I get asked with greater frequency in the forums about free templates for osCommerce and quite frankly there isn’t any per se. I’m like most template designers and we tend to hack the code quite a bit to get osCommerce to behave the way we want and although I do have a solid foundation of all CSS layouts I’m reluctant to dispose of them at NO cost. So I propose to my php coder, Mark, that we draft a small how to build templates for oscommerce type of ebook and include a few free templates that way. I figure $10 is nearly no money but enough motive to take the time to produce a high enough quality video tutorial to justify doing so.

How to build beautiful oscommerce templates

I’m not sure I like the title yet but for now that is the name of the small guide. As stated above, I’m going to post it up as a $10 download item and include a few video tutorials on the overview and a few code snippets that are essential to understand and then a few templates.

Now keep in mind. I’ve been sending people to www.oscmax.com and www.creloaded.com at a regular and steady rate because the template systems in those applications (one BTS the other STS) are much easier to change on the fly than hard coded oscommerce. That and the fact that both of these loaded versions of oscommerce are already pre-modded with the things nearly ALL people ask for and the admin panel on each is so much more cleaner to work with.

Its my suggestion that if you are a NEW STORE OWNER then you strongly consider CRELoaded or osCMax because these are actively and professionally maintained almost daily. The only real drawback of each is that they are HEAVILY BRANDED. osCMax alone had its web hosting options so present throughout the application that I considered it a plague and removed all of it in the build I install for clients. If you consider a similar option then leave Mikes copyright details on his loaded version but removal of all the free ads is something you may want to do if you plan on installing for a customer that is already hosted.

This is my second weekend attempt at getting my redesign done so I’ll keep you posted on the changes.

CRELoaded - osCommerce - WordPress Templates

Posted on June 7, 2007
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Integrated design and templates - WordPress eCommerce

Its interesting! In the past 4 months after people reading my posts around the web about making osCommerce and WordPress sing together how persistent the questions keep on rolling in.

I put together a little tutorial over on www.livedemosite.com in the articles section of Joomla which I’ll make live and it covers some of the key steps you need to consider and keep in mind in order to pull it off.

I’m 95% designer and 5% everything else (sort of) so much of what I’ve done has everything to do with the look and feel of the integration. This poses problems for those that want custom coding because up until this point almost no one ever asks for it when it comes to sharing the user database and such. Well that is about to change.

I hired a programmer to complete a bridge so I can bring together WordPress and either osCommerce, osCMax, or CRELoaded users together. It will basically be a simple login replacement form for either of the loaded variants of osCommerce replacing the existing one. The logic is simple and I’ll disclose more on that later.

I’ll keep you posted in more detailed rant later.

Free Open Realty Templates

Posted on June 7, 2007
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Real Estate Professionals and Open-Realty

Ok so I got a little flack recently for making templates available only on my demo sites or over at the cssdesignmagic.com site which has been updated recently and I figured I’d drop in a plug without revealing to much.

You see, I get asked for templates no less than 5 times a day related to the real estate industry and the funny thing is I still can’t figure out how exactly people are downloading my designs from ASiteAbove.com and this site. I’ve NEVER published a URL on this site to ANY of my designs EVER and I don’t plan to until I’m completely finished with my redesign of this blog template and the new one is applied at TheBrokersEdge.com (a toss together design, not real beautiful in my opinion)

So this is a heads up. I’m giving several away while still providing some commercial solutions for good ole Open Realty in the hopes that professionals will still consider Open Realty as a pretty good tool for entry level to mid sized agencies and or offices. Its beautiful for the individual agent as well.

So if you’re a real estate pro and want a template then please email me. I’ve made it no secret that I’ll share these designs freely but I’m not posting them up publicly until my new interface is finished.

HTML Tables to CSS conversion

Posted on May 31, 2007
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Convert that HTML Table layout to a CSS XHTML layout

Seems to be a common request of me in recent days the conversion of tabled layouts to CSS. In the last week I’ve converted plenty of static HTML Table layout sites to the more lean and mean CSS type layout and one thing I always tell people is that if you are coming from a static type situation or even ASP, JSP, PHP, etc you can preserve your links and site structure with the use of Joomla and sometimes with the use of WordPress providing provision is setup in advance for such things.

Now what this means is in the event you have a site with great PR and indexing in Google and decide to move to a more dynamic database driven setup like Joomla you can keep your page rank and your existing link structure without risking loss of PR or rank. How, cleverly and if you ask me for examples I’ve got plenty.

osCMax osCommerce Templates

Posted on May 29, 2007
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osCMax osCommerce Template Foundations

Looking through my inventory late last night to clean up my auto archive drive I discovered I had created 5 different versions of osCMax template foundation masters ranging from all CSS layouts (heavily modified content tpl files) to variable width and and column layout masters. After testing them at about 1AM this morning on my demo domain with a few flavors of osCommerce, I was able to get all 5 versions of template masters working as drop in solutions. Now CRELoaded, which I also have master layouts for, I did not test as of yet. But if you are a web designer and or site owner this foundation set will be a beautiful little resource that can save you a spank of money.

Custom osCommerce and osCMax Templates for $30?

When you consider the costs of the average template for osCMax or osCommerce is in the neighborhood of $140 then compare it to the price of customization which can quickly reach $1,500, $30 almost sounds like a typo. Well its not and here is why.

To begin with, my colleagues in education and I have been working on the Rapid Template Design Series with every spare moment available in order to have it ready for the printers and in college bookstores by Fall Semester 2007. osCommerce has never been part of the objective in teaching template design for largely because of the hard coded nature that osCommerce requires for creating custom designs. In fact many of the variant ideas we had for the RTDS have been dropped because the concern for showing bias has always been forthright on our minds. So that lead up to a proposition in the structure of the RTDS in general. You can go almost anywhere on the internet and find some sort of template kit for some application that may be what you are looking for, but none of them have the same academic agenda from its conception as the RTDS does.

The beautiful thing about the entire RTD Series is that ANY instructor (college, high school, university, or trade school) can publish supplemental materials using the publishing features in the series and simply add them into the bundled syllabus expanding the course almost effortlessly without the need for costly alternatives.

When you consider that our competitors product from the current educational industry publishers, instructors are pretty much grid locked into a particular format for books and learning material. I mean the alternative is what? Write a book, build a course, maybe make a few power point slide shows? Not very exciting but none the less required for any unique application to a course. With the RTDS this is moot as our system has core components necessary for expanding or adding on to the course materials in what the industry simply calls supplementals.

So, I’m going to release this template foundation for osCommerce and osCMax with guides as a supplemental release. Price? $30, and will be the only supplemental in our series that is actually downloadable and not physical delivery as the RTDS is. So I’m calling this supplemental “Open Source Commerce Builder” RTDS supplemental

What does the Open Source Commerce Builder include?

It includes the 5 master template foundations for osCMax, a small collection of code snippets, a PDF manual, 38+ minutes of FLASH SWF or FLV format tutorials, and an assortment of other elements needed for the creation of a custom theme / template for osCommerce or osCMax without having to pay a designer like me a thousand dollars for your design.

How do I get it?

So simple I feel embarrassed for not using a PayPal button or order form. But this site is my personal NON business blog not one of my commerce sites so simply send $30 to sales - at - jaredsdesigns.com (it says Jared’sDesigns) and delivery will be via download link sent to the email address I receive in the PayPal notification. Delivery date will be June 4th unless you don’t care about the audio quality of the tutorials then I’ll email it the following day. My audio person only does freelance on weekends for designers and animators so I’ll have to wait until he can clean up the voice overs for me. If this isn’t important, I’ll send the following day.

Why wait until the following day to send? In the years I’ve been building templates for template clubs I’ve learned that all of them wait a day to deliver digital goods like these largely because when accepting PayPal its a good idea to make certain verification has been provided.

Rapid Template Design Series

Posted on May 27, 2007
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Rapid Template Design Kit Renamed

Today I opened my mail sitting on the counter for three days and discovered that one of the colleges that use my RTDK (Rapid Template Design Kit) requests that I change the name.

An unusual request but valid none the less as I’ve long considered it myself, so here is the skinny on the pending updates. The reason behind the request is that it should reflect its use in various courses that use the kit such as PhotoShop for Web Masters, Introduction to Web Design, Graphics Design Games and Web, etc. All of these are non credit courses.

So after meeting briefly with the other three instructors who were responsible for the development of the instructional materials, we agreed we would change the name to Rapid Template Design Series. I wanted to name it Photoshop Design Series but there is a book with that title and a company that publishes a magazine also uses that name as well. I don’t want to tangle with big publishers so Rapid Template Design Series is what its now called.

A Little History of the RTDK

For those who don’t recall or may just be tuning in especially you who are educators and instructors, here is where the RTDK came from. The RTDK in part, started out back in 2003 as a small collection of tutorials on designing templates for a product called OpenRealty that I offered free of charge on my old site JaredsDesigns.com. Just shy of 1,800 copies in total were downloaded while it was available. Then…

In 2004 I was contracted to convert an existing K12 school districts static html website to a CMS which we chose Mambo after comparing it to more complex solutions available at the time. Part of our agreement was to provide three years tech support and a collection of instructional videos for the staff whom will use Mambo to administer the schools departments. Departments included for example physical education, math, english, the library and so on. Mambo CMS was a sure win because of its categories and sections way of organizing content. This became the second part of the mix.

Then the template kit materials became available in November 2004 and sold in the schools book store as nothing more than a shrink wrapped set of instructional papers, all pre punched for a three ring binder, two CD’s, the class syllabus, and a collection of assignments for use in a NON credit class on web design. Who the course was marketed to isn’t important, but the first kit was the precursor to our more lofty idea. Maintaining support materials for the half dozen schools that use this little instructional packet is quite simple as we only update the label on the cover per semester and update the versions of any tool included on the CD.

After NON students begin to buy the materials after having read my posts on my community college teachers blog, a few of us figured it might be a good idea for an online product. The materials in the bookstore are not self contained meaning that they require instruction. So the plan then was to provide instruction by video with an instructor to accompany the materials. A full blown course compliment was born.

Where is the template design kit?

Well if you attend colleges in Western Washington State you can likely get it in the book store. They DON’T DO mail order and if you need the course ASAP as a college then Packet Publishers and Distributors will have it in their catalog this summer. TCP will have it and so will Amazon in November of this year if deadlines are met. The online ordering version will be available on the site http://www.templatedesignkit.com this late summer and will be ranging in price from $9.95 to $149.95 depending on series (print, web, etc). Schools and colleges are discounted 70% on all series above the intro series and resellers and web site owners who sell the material will receive a generous price break as well. This is a physical delivery product because of weight, volume and number of computer files included with the printed guides.

If you have questions, contact me but please keep in mind that the current version does not have an ISBN as of yet so if you are from a school or college requiring ISBN numbers for your catalogs you should list it as supplemental materials until our application returns from the government. All materials are copyright 2004 - 2007.

Open Realty Templates - Themes - Joomla

Posted on May 21, 2007
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Two for one

Well I had thought long about this today and what I’m going to do is this. I’m going to release for both OpenRealty, Joomla OpenRealty, and WordPress with the current inventory.

I’ll publish more on this later but until then send me an email if you have questions.

Real Estate Listing Plugin - Pre Release Update

Posted on May 21, 2007
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Ok it looks like its pretty much unavoidable. Have you ever noticed that nearly all plugins for WordPress don’t require you to edit and or add a database? It was obvious from the get go that our plugin would require a full blown install of the listing manager database and that the plugin would be the WordPress part that provided the interface and display of the listings.

Well today it looks like a few things are not going to be able to be avoided right up front. Here is the news I got from my programmer first thing this morning.

A ) The database will have a separate installer built which will be simple on the first release and subsequent releases will ask you a series of questions about the field names you want to have of which those necessary for normalization will be required such as State, Agent, City and so on as these things are entered only as many times as needed and not duplicated.

B ) Manual editing of tables is required first release as stated before but as mentioned before we told you that using the WordPress Loop in regards to PAGES and not just posts is how you will control the layout of the listings details page. So for example if you had say 3 or 4 different Listings Details Pages you wanted to use for various property types (rentals, luxury, condo, residential) you could have a custom layout per each. Thats the good news. The silly issue we are encountering is the widgets display of featured listings either 1 up or up to 6 up and rotating them from the database. Not a problem per se but people are likely going to want to install this on existing sites and THAT is a problem because it WILL NOT WORK.

C ) ONLY ONE Search Results Page can exist and at this point and the layout changes so far MUST be made in the functions.php file of the WordPress theme of which I’ll supply a pair, an unedited generic no images bare naked one for designers and a default one from my design inventory.

I’ll keep you posted. In the mean time get your FREE Real Estate Blog by emailing me and I’ll set you up with plugins and pre-mods already configured for you.

EDIT: Real Estate Plugin and K2 Sidebar Modules

BTW I forgot to mention that even though the K2 Sidebar Modules are more powerful and work better when developing templates themes in the past following the methodology of the wordpress loop, too many people are going to have issues with this so Widgets is the direction for displaying featured properties and short links to listings. I’ve always been a fan of the K2SBM as many of my themes were based on it but I see no way around this.

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