WordPress Real Estate Plugin

Posted on October 7, 2009
Filed Under Real Estate News, Real Estate Websites | Leave a Comment

Competing with Real Estate WordPress Plug-ins and Solutions?

Who is interested in having a Real Estate listings manager plugin for WordPress? According to all the contact queries we have received between 5 blogs and two forums suggests that theme developers and solution providers occupy the majority. After reviewing all the contact requests we have received, it was truly surprising to find that almost half of those who queried the availability, license and terms of use regarding our new plug-in were actually people in the business of building Real Estate websites or themes for the industry. So what I did was conduct about 5 hours of stat tracking and google searches to determine where the interest (or concern) had motivated a peak in requests in just 30 days times. What I discovered was even more of a surprise than I had expected.

After looking at the results of my research for real estate and WordPress related things, as expected, I ran into the usual clutter and “reff-raff” of pointless results. Mixed right in with all the keyword spammers and misleading advertisements I discovered that it was a pretty evenly disbursed amount of service providers for Real Estate website development and theme design with a few interesting twists. Reviewing they days bookmarks and what I had penned in my spiral bound notepad revealed a few interesting things.

I discovered that there is at this very moment (October 6th 2009) 11 separate efforts to build a WordPress Real Estate plugin and or WordPress related integration feature of sorts. Of those 11 I found, I can easily identify 4 of the projects as being initiated by theme developers and 2 as solution providers whom I’ve worked with in the past. One of these solution providers is a very well known company and is a late bloomer in the WordPress for Real Estate solution mix. The last half dozen are for projects on a small level that seek to integrate listings features into their theme options panel among other things. But what does all this mean?

Many of the people that have contacted us I can easily spot as those who have bid on projects in the freelance forums and want to take a look at what we have in order to deliver on their bid. Its not an unusual thing, it happens quite frequently according to some and I’d tend to agree with the assessment of others, that many projects being built for freelance code projects are built from modified solutions that already exist. So, I answered many emails with the same general promise even though it was prior to me really putting it together that many of these contacts were in fact seeking to develop a similar solution. I’m glad I was right in concluding that we should make this available without complex restrictions and licenses.

In answer to many email questions, you CAN use this in your commercial solutions and projects. You do get to have the 3.0 upgrade when it becomes available in February or March. Additionally we do provide good foundation themes which I’ll expand on below.

Please RELAX! We support developers with all of our plugins.

There isn’t a single plugin or addon I publish that isn’t built with the end user in mind. The same is true of my plan from the start that theme developers and other design professionals would like to use these products without complex license or royalty fee requirements. The WordPress Menu Creator is now distributed in about 15 different themes at last count with 3 of them using custom code we put together for the theme developer. I can confidently state that of all the projects I co-develop and or co-publish, all of them are built for easy integration and distribution with third party theme developers and solution providers. We publish 33 plugins and addons currently between The UltimateIDX, Ritchey Web Services, Click Once Computing, Pro Marketing Group, EZPro Realty and IDX Web Solutions with our latest edition being for eCommerce. But you may be asking what does distribution entail? If you build themes or you provide a solution to your clients or you are simply an end user as in the case of a Realtor, car or boat dealership, or maybe even a classified ads publisher, then the plugins and addons we develop can be used in your projects without complex licensing requirements with only one exception.

Paid Support for Plug-ins and Themes

Its not just a casual trend anymore to see that so many GNU / GPL code developers are gravitating toward a paid support method to further the development of their free products. It makes perfect sense in fact if you take notice that many of or should I say the majority of open source projects sit for long periods of time unaltered and rarely updated. By providing commercialized support a plugin developer can achieve two primary things. The first is that support is given to users who are not just curiosity seekers which makes for a more professional forum. Second, it drives the development.

What will this new WordPress Plugin offer for the theme developer or solution provider? What will paid support include and what can be expected?

Royalty free use in your projects and solutions. We already do this with all of our freely available plugins.
Royalty free use in your theme packages. (more about this on WPRealty.org)
Paid support gets you many things at a professional level in response to your support needs including those things hosting related.
Paid developer licenses gets you a fully unbranded version. Many projects have branding and link backs which you can opt out of by various conditions, so to is this plugin but we made it super easy and affordable.
Paid support also extends to supporting commercial themes such as StudioPress, iThemes, Thesis, Gorilla Themes among others. Its like a one stop shop for support for all those commercial themes in one easy to manage location.
Paid support gets access to plugins and extensions not GNU/GPL available. Many are in fact being sold elsewhere for $200 – $300, with one of the paid support solutions you get them free.

IDX RETS for WordPress Update

Posted on October 2, 2009
Filed Under Real Estate News, Real Estate Websites | 24 Comments

The IDX / RETS WordPress Plugin Release is running about three days behind the target release date as it’s looking more like Monday and possibly Tuesday for first release. We are doing work with a few Realtors who opted to be our Beta Testers but its only for bug hunting.

What caused the release date delay? Well its nothing serious, we wanted to make sure that the actual plugin did not conflict with other plugins and during our test we found a conflict with the NextGen Gallery and there were a few permalink quirks that needed hashing out. Since some plugins make global calls to things like jQuery, there has been a few conflicts with the registration module and the Google Maps feature. One of the nice features about this plugin is the way it automatically ties in your registered users to for your blog in order for them to automatically be designated as potential clients for the purpose of seeing special listing features and the ability to bookmark properties. This is done so people do not have to take some sort of secondary action if they are already members of your blog. I’m sure its a feature you will appreciate if you have an existing blog with members.

Anyway, good plugin development would not attempt to use exact paths based on a presumed folder structure or bother to hard coded inclusions of things that are already in the WordPress core. Because so many plugin developers do just that it has caused a little issue with our admin panel so we have been working to fix it.

Demo of the IDX / RETS empowered WordPress Plugin?

Yes, having received a handful of requests for this I’ll say that there is one, but! Only upon request can I send you the link and password at this point. Because the MLS “demo data” is in the site we are required to NOT make it public. Each MLS is different, some don’t bother to provide demo data but when they do they like the data to be for development purposes only. Well, most the time. So although we have a new data tester for your use as well, at this time until the first of the week, we are stuck with the data example we have.

OpenRealty Duplicate Content and 404 URL Tip

Posted on September 30, 2009
Filed Under Open Realty Tips, Real Estate Websites | Leave a Comment

How to avoid a mishap in your design by forgetting a pair of simple steps.

First I’d like to say that these are NOT Errors in OpenRealty and they are not bugs. So its important to keep that in mind. These tips are really about how to avoid it happening in the event you don’t pay special attention to a few key features.

After working on an MLS project in the SOCAL market (Southern California) for a guy many many months ago we were pleased at how well the Joomla / OpenRealty site came together in terms of presentation and ease of user interaction with the clean interface. After many months however there was this persistent issue of duplicate content and literally thousands of 404’s. These things can present a nasty little problem with your efforts to actually rank well for “Long Tail” terms with those listings. What was happening and how could we fix it?

First lets deal with the 404s in your OpenRealty site.

The 404’s are sometimes a reality of MLS empowered sites for good logical reason. Listings that get populated by MLS data tend to change with frequency and unless the market is completely dead, properties do in fact sell. When they sell they get either removed from the project website or they get marked as sold. Now, depending on the MLS rules, some will not allow you to show properties that do not have the status of active or pending. This would then automatically rule out the option of leaving the listing and showing it as simply “Sold”. In our case this was true and we can only show what SOCAL allows to be shown so we had to deal with the absence of listings that were indexed and then no longer available.

The way to handle isn’t really that complex because OpenRealty makes it possible in the way the site can be structured. It involves the creation of a 404 page in your OpenRealty content editor that you simply title and provide a nice SEF URL name to, lets say we simply call it notfound.html which if your sef settings are set to “Search Engine Friendly” should net you page-notfound.html. Keep this in mind because you can do this for all your error pages as you will see how this comes together in a moment.

Next you will want to edit your htaccess file that comes with OpenRealty to include the following;

ErrorDocument 400 /page-badrequest.html
ErrorDocument 401 /page-authorization-required.html
ErrorDocument 403 /page-forbidden.html
ErrorDocument 404 /page-notfound.html
ErrorDocument 500 /page-servererror.html

Again, keep in mind that the names of those files are actually OpenRealty pages. This serves you well by structuring the the site with a few important feature requirements. First, it makes your error pages consistent with your design, and second it allows you to add custom content relevant to some action that the user / visitor can take.

The next step follows a nifty little feature that OpenRealty has and that is custom main.html templates which you can rename followed by the page ID. It works like this; IF your 404 page is page ID 7 then you create a duplicate copy of your main.html and rename it page7_main.htm then in the header area of the new page you want to put in the meta tags for the no follow no index like so;

<meta http-equiv="cache-control" content="no-cache" />
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow" />
<meta name="googlebot" content="noarchive" />

When a bot encounters the 404 page, it is told to not index, not follow and to not archive. So if you end up at say http://www.openrealty-website.com/this-cool-page-is-missing.html for instance the URL should remain even though the 404 page is actually displayed.

Now we deal with a potential issue of duplicate content.

We noticed that in some OpenRealty themes on the market, the link for adding listings to your favorites, in either the search results or the listing details has a URL is NOT set to rel=”nofollow”. This is however NOT an issue if you remember to use the correct {check_member} tags OpenRealty demonstrates by default. Now the fact that this escaped my attention for so long annoys me greatly because I normally check every link to verify how its being used and what it actually leads to before calling a project done. Taking for granted that I was using an OpenRealty tag like {link_add_favorites} without the much needed {check_member} just embarrassed me. It didn’t register that I should examine those links because they were for internal features not pages or content per se. But I was wrong in letting it escape my attention because this tag for adding listings to favorites does little more than set the feature for your bookmarking and simply reloads the same page. See why it was a problem? I’ll show you by example with the report generated by our SEO tools, what you will see is ;

Pages with duplicate meta descriptions,Pages with duplicate content
This Orange County Residential property is located in San Clemente California 2205 Via Iris and is l,

http://www.thedomain.com/realestate/index.php?action=addtofavorites&listingID=96280796

| http://www.thedomain.com/realestate/listing-san-clemente-california-2205-via-iris-96280796.html

Both the URL to the listing and the URL to the “index.php?action=addtofavorites” is showing duplicate content and duplicate meta data. This fix is exceptionally easy however. OpenRealty provides an alternative tag that can be used where I could correct this which is {link_add_favorites_url} and its use would look something like;

<a href="{link_add_favorites_url}" title="Add To Favorites" rel="nofollow">Add To Favorites</a>

It quite literally should look like this but not in our situation. I’ll explain in the special note below.

{check_member}
{link_add_favorites}
{/check_member}

Important Note About This Post
Because of the {check_member} tags google should not even be able to see the add to favorites but we setup a provision in this particular site for google to bypass the registration process in part because we have the site set to allow for three searches prior to requiring you to register. We allow google to get right past that. But how? A small moded addon and the use of sessions to control the functionality. In your situation you are NOT likely to encounter this unless you leave your option open as we did.

DwellIcious for OpenRealty and WordPress

Posted on June 1, 2009
Filed Under Real Estate News, Real Estate Websites | 1 Comment

There are plenty of real estate websites that have clever user enhanced features in order to provide their visitors with the ability perform certain tasks like compare listings, bookmark listings, or maybe register for updates in order to receive notification of changes to properties they have interest in. These are pretty common features and some more involved real estate websites may even provide home seekers the ability to save their search results for future reference. Optionally, a home seeker could potentially receive updates to properties meeting their search criteria in several different formats such as RSS, email or by SMS messages direct to their cell phone. Wouldn’t it be nice to have some of these features available in one location regardless of the sites you visit? Its a feature destined to surface and it has, in the form of a free online social networking service for real estate websites called Dwellicious.
Dwellicious WordPress OpenRealty
Dwellicious social bookmarking is to real estate what delicious social bookmarking is to blogging. With Dwellicious a registered users can visit Dwellicious empowered real estate websites all over the web and selectively add their own an inventory of favorite real estate listings to their Dwellicious favorites in order to not only instantly share the listings but compare properties, receive updates, and even examine dynamic demographic data about the listing courtesy of Zillow. Having added the Dwellicious feature to several Open Realty sites in the past weeks, we wasted no time in building a template inclusion file to provide a way to integrate this feature in with relatively little effort (aside from configuration time which can be a few hours). The results are thus far rather impressive and the ability to have social bookmarking for real estate listings is unlike any previous methods we have employed.

For myself and my associates who build real estate websites as a profession, we understand that the way to answer consumer demand is to provide the bigger better deal in home search functionality. Plainly put, provide as many features necessary to be of good quality service to the home seeker. Nearly all real estate websites provide at bare minimum general information in service to their market, but cutting edge websites that appear to be setting the standard will enhance the home seekers experience by providing as much detailed information about each individual listing as they officially can. This may include, map search, street view, demographic data which could include schools, employment and even agricultural or census data. But part of the experience is also a visual one that may include things like charts, calculators or even slideshows for featured listings among many other things. For the for-mentioned reasons it has been the key motivating factor in the development and publishing of all of our FREE plug-ins and add-ons for WordPress and Open Realty. Now, with this service provided by Dwellicious, once it is implemented into a real estate website, should prove to be one of the most important features a site owner could offer. It is my opinion that Dwellicious is going to be as big as any of the macro services currently so popular in social networking and it is my gut feeling that integration with other services is on the horizon.

NEW WordPress & OpenRealty Bridge

Posted on October 6, 2008
Filed Under Real Estate News, Real Estate Websites, WordPress Wisdom | 11 Comments

WordPress Realty has gotten much better as of 3PM today! I have ranted about this plugin for seven months now, testing and building in between client projects arriving at this point where I have the ONLY 100% free OpenRealty WordPress plugin bridge which is great. Today the developers of EZProRealty have decided to contract for another FREE version which will include a newly added feature for session management for bridging user logins and registrations between the applications.

After an hour long phone call with the developers of EZProRealty we decided upon taking my existing FREE PLUGIN and tossing it out the window and creating a new plugin with the same title “WP Realty” by combining several existing solutions into one complete solution. This new plugin or should I say a rework of the old plugin, will include features that literally turn your WordPress blog into a listings manager while keeping applications separate in order to preserve your options and advantages.

I’ve made countless posts in forums and blogs that the importance of bridging is vastly superior to integrating because applications can be maintained separately yet work with one another to make the end solution easier to maintain. This rework of the free plugin will bring in a pair of very important features above and beyond what was previously planned. A new login panel will be built as an inline code element to display on any page and can be easily added to a sites sidebar for cross link building and the addition of session bridging between each application has already been added but NOT for the front end users. These two new features and the new user defined template layout will make this plugin sing for WordPress users. Did I mention that this plugin as with ALL of my WordPress and OpenRealty plugins is 100% FREE.

What plugins and snippets are available right this minute.

Featured Listings Anywhere
Listings Details Slide Show (similar to smoothies but FREE!)
Print Friendly PDF
WordPress Featured (has been available for months)
WordPress Listings Rotator
Page Peel for OpenX (not updated to the latest OpenX yet, sorry, busy schedule)
Joomla 1.0.15 External Modules
Joomla 1.5 Native EZProRealty Component (Works 100% Release 1.0)
WordPress Menu Manager (Works 100%)
Joomla / WP latest Posts (Works 100%)
OpenRealty Featured Listings Manager, FREE but Beta
AWBS Template Kit (Not updated to current release but available none the less.)
OpenRealty Dreamweaver CS3 Extension.
WordPress Dreamweaver CS3 Extension.
WP / OpenRealty registration bridge snippet
WP / OpenRealty search results content snippet

If its not listed above then its either BETA or not ready for release. So where exactly are all these free tools? Well spread out a little for many reasons but ANY OF THE ABOVE can be requested from me by email or by visiting the project sites associated with each of our plugins.

WP Featured Example

Posted on August 13, 2008
Filed Under Real Estate Websites | Leave a Comment

I’ve been busy beyond belief I broke free for a few minutes to visit my site after a month and get some things cleaned up. I’ve got the newest WP Featured ready for download but will not load it up until later in the week. For now you can visit the download link on the right for the version 1.2 of this plug-in or simply click here >> Featured Listings Plugin

Here is an example using a default template (featured_3.html) which has no styling so you can see basically how this works. Sorry for such crapy documentation, I’ve been pretty busy with RETS and IDX stuff for OpenRealty projects.

{featured_1}

Quick WP Featured Listings Video Tutorial

IMPORTANT WP Featured Listings Configuration Notes

A few quick configuration notes This plug-in was the second release and it has some code issues I’ve since fixed and I’ve updated to work with 2.6+ of WordPress and I promise to get that uploaded in the next few days. There have been dozens and dozens of emails regarding an error this produces when trying to display listings so I’m going to clear that up in bulk right here.

The issue is the same in nearly every case and what happens is the field where you enter the path to open realty needs to be EXACT or it simply will not work.

If for example you have OpenRealty installed in /realestate/ as I do and you enter into the WP Featured admin panel for the path to OpenRealty as /realestate/ it will most likely work but on some servers it will toss an error. Because of this you may have to enter the location from the server root which means if you are on a cpanel server for instance it would be /home/jaredritchey/public_html/realestate/ or if on a Plesk server maybe like /var/www/vhosts/jaredritchey.com/httpdocs/realestate/

The second issue people encounter with this version is that they don’t understand the idea behind “Instances” and because of this, I have renamed this in the newest version to “Featured Listing Instance Number” to articulate it a tad better. I came up with the idea of calling each featured instance an “instance” for lack of a better term at the time. Thus the way to understand it is like this; if you create several blog posts or pages about a particular community or subdivision and you decide that you would like to show maybe 5 or 10 or 15 featured listings in any of those posts for a particular subdivision then you need to create a WP Featured Listings Instance Number. That instance is simply a way to identify an instance of a WP Featured Listing.

I stuck with numbers for two basic reasons. I figured that by default, WordPress post URL’s end with a number for the post ID and if a person wanted to match the instance to a post ID it would help in managing the instances. The second reason was that all of the clients I built this for, each had wanted to display a “specific listing” or property in a “specific post” that they were seeking to market and I explained that the best way is to simply setup an instance and give it the MLS# for ease of management. So if you create an instance with the number of say 21 or maybe using an MLS number like 368748, then your template tag for your post would be { featured_21 } and it will render the listings based on the params you set for that instance.

Had I not been up to my neck in cleaning up really nasty code on several projects for The Brokers Edge clients I would have had more time to wrap up the documentation. I can promise you this, the newest version of this plug-in has features that make it sing and the upgrade is seamless and painless and I’ve included video documentation with great details. Its also important to note that we have a BRAND SPANKING NEW plug-in that does for WordPress what CMSRealty did for Joomla. It takes OpenRealty listings and puts everything into WordPress while maintaining nice clean SEF URL’s and puts the OpenRealty admin panel in a WordPress admin panel for ease of maintenance. I have a new domain already setup for it.

Now, rather than just post those things without proper preparation, I’ll first get the site reorganized which I’m right now in the middle of now. I let this site go for way to long unfortunately. Its like the shoe makers kids not having shoes. Just to busy with client work to take care of my own things. Broken links, nasty unvalidated code, poor layout issues in content, broken downloads and more are being redone. So, until then, thanks for visiting and feel free to contact me with any questions you may have.

WP Featured Listings Plugin Download

Posted on April 30, 2008
Filed Under Real Estate Websites | 1 Comment

Quick post for you to download the featured listings plugin. Select the link below under "Assorted Featured" bottom right to visit the download page or simply click http://www.jaredritchey.com/featured-listings-plugin

Why you should check back in the next few days!

Adding video tutorials on how to use the plugin
I’ve setup a forum which will be skinned to look like my main blog when I reskin it. http://www.jaredritchey.com/forum/
New updates to the plugin will have been tested and added
New templates for layouts will have been added
The details and instructions page will be complete
More on the way.

I’ll be posting future updates to this product in the forums and on the product landing page for each plugin.

General Dynamics Itronix Laptop Software Drivers

Posted on March 16, 2008
Filed Under Real Estate Websites | 3 Comments

IX250 IX260 and IX260+ (plux) Drivers

Here is a collection of all drivers for these laptops that I’ve once again updated after digging them out of the archive directory.

I get a lot of emails and traffic to the original post regarding the laptop drivers I had assembled. After spending a great deal of time locating them, I packaged them up in to a single download which I’ve updated again today.

Back when I purchased a handful of these laptops on ebay I discovered that none of them came with driver software which made the task daunting to get an OS loaded.

These machines are not top of the line in CPU and memory speed but I can’t suggest a better more affordable or durable computer to toss in your truck to go camping or fishing or even for use in service vehicles for lawn care, construction, security services, or anything where you need mobile computing. The mere fact that these computers can connect to a standard Motorola 9211 radio makes them ideal for contractors that want to use them for GPS mapping among other things.

Next on my list is a pair of vehicle mounts and a pair internal radio updates. To visit the updated collection of software drivers please visit the Downloads Area

WordPress Featured Listings Scenario

Posted on March 14, 2008
Filed Under Products, Real Estate News, Real Estate Websites | Leave a Comment

Featured Real Estate Listings for SEO advantages

Lets look at a scenario for building SEF and SEO presentable content for your blog with real estate listings. In the previous post I outlined some of the basic issues we encountered with the beta versions and then went on to briefly explain some of those changes for this version 1.2.1 release. One way to articulate the details for those changes would be to simply present a scenario for better understanding of why this method is so very important and beneficial. First lets do a little history about writing effective real estate blog marketing posts, and then examine the scenario

Marketing Real Estate Listings With Your Blog – Search Engine strategy proven to work.

One thing I’ve been telling many of my Realtor clients is that when using a blog, should they discover that they have little time to contribute to the blog on a regular bases, they could consider extending an opportunity to their clients to write content for them. How and why you might ask? The reasons and benefits may surprise you.

Back in October 2006 when I began using WordPress regularly on Realtor sites, I came up with the notion that no one really knows their home better than the owner of the home (as most agree) and the home owner would be better positioned for writing informative content. MLS and many times website inclusion of an mls type feed present very little useful information to a prospective buyer as much of it is rote bland summary points. As such I came up with a solution that we decided to test out on a few real estate sites. As said, mls data can be rote, boring and mundane and it stood to reason that if a Realtor could present better information about a property he / she would be in a better position to sell that property. Right?

So by extending an opportunity to home owners to write detailed information about their homes and provide photos, among other things, a Realtor could publish valuable details to their blogs therein providing a link back to the listing details for that property in a way that better markets the property. Hence one of the motivating factors in building the WordPress Featured Listings plug-in.

Since testing this idea over the span of just over a year now, we discovered that everyone who employs this method reports back extremely favorable results. Some devices being employed in addition to the home owner’s submitted content is the inclusion of things like charts and or maintenance schedules that have been logged over time by the home owner which can include remodel expenses, roofing, lawn care, patching the driveway and other things readers would be interested in. I know that if I were shopping for a home, I’d be interested in knowing how often someone had performed home owner maintenance and I’m sure others would be too when shopping for a home. A blog presents a way to achieve this with home owner submitted content. As most of my Realtor clients use a format schedule I assembled for them, they can set the criteria of the types of things a home owner can or should cover in describing their home. More on this later in the post but for now, just keep the premise in mind as we look at this scenario.

Marking My Featured Real Estate Listing (scenario)

New listing by Realtor: Some Luxury Home In Some Town, Some State
Following a common standard operating procedure the Realtor tasks his staff to add the listing to the local MLS, orders a yard sign, and sets about adding the property to their prescribed marketing efforts (website, printed magazines, news paper and other rag sheets etc…)

The Realtor decides that he is way to busy to write a blog post about the property and may opt instead to task an employee to write the post following some checklists and procedures for writing such content or the Realtor may outsource the content writing to a copywriter. All said and done, the copy complete, property listed, now time will tell how effective those efforts are. But, why leave it at that?

This same Realtor is an educated Realtor with lots of marketing and psychology studies in his background so this Realtor knows that a more personable and heart felt the informative description is in the blogs copy, the longer a person will stay on the site and the more likely they contact the Realtor would be. But who is to write about this property in such a way and wouldn’t it cost a great deal to have it professionally written with all the checks and balances of keyword density and link relevance? This two part questions is one we can answer in two sentences.

The Realtor extends the opportunity to his client home owner to share as much detail as their heart desires and they can include video tours, photos and other media elements to be published on the world wide web. Next the Realtor visits a site like The Brokers Edge and uses the online tools for checking the material for link relevance, keyword density, and other facets prior to publishing, which the Realtor does by using a pre-formatted method like the one included in our Professional WP Editor Plug-in. Now the post is ready for the next step.

The Realtor uses the WordPress Featured Listings plug-in and includes a single instance of this particular properties listing that rotates random images from those available with each refresh of the page. Then the Realtor adds a second featured listing inclusion using the WordPress Featured Listings plug-in showing an additional 3, 5, or say 10 listings from that very neighborhood which he / she includes just below the blog post. Do you see where I’m going with this?

Who stands to know more, write more and inform more about a particular home than a home owner? Who can write how they "feel" about their home, the neighborhood, the schools, and other facets of a home so effectively? Any Realtor would be hard pressed to provide such information in a cost effective way and even more hard pressed to justify such an expense of conducting research the home owner already knows. write from their perspective for inclusion into the Real Estate blog for greater potential ranking and buyer interaction.

Now you might just say why not include hard coded links in the post to the listings details from photos you add to the post? Why use the Featured Listings WordPress plug-in for such a mundane task.? The answer is simple. Speed and flexibility. With this plug-in we have been able to create custom variants for clients that allow them to use it with products like the UltimateIDX, IDX Web Pro, vieleRETS and others. It has been recently tested with not only Open Realty 2.4.4 but the variant version called EZ Pro Realty and we have plans to port a version to EZRealty for Joomla this next week.

Please read the latest posts on this today.

WordPress Post Planner Plugin

Posted on March 10, 2008
Filed Under Real Estate Websites | Leave a Comment

Effective content planning for your WordPress blog.

Some time ago I had a friend write me a small PHP application of sorts that was used to assist in the assembly of well structured written content following the 5 paragraph narrative format of a thesis writing project. Having built the mini-app for one of my classes, the idea behind the tool was based almost entirely on the process of good writing. Taking from the influence of the Scott Forshmans English Writing Handbook, the mini-app was essentially a collection of RTF generators where fields were filled in depending on the format chosen.

Now, you may have seen or even used content generators in Microsoft Word or other popular document publishing solutions, but none seemed to exist for the web and certainly none seemed to exist for blogging. If a blogger could publish content based on pre-formed and well structured writing formats, the expected quality of the content should increase right?

Well, after looking at all the old documents I had on writing styles and processes taught in grammar schools and English classes, I came up with an idea to make many of these "rote format" methods of writing a tool for bloggers by building a WordPress plugin to assist in the writing process. Although many professional bloggers tend to use offline tools for drafting content, many I’ve spoken with said that the tools for truly professional writing and editing are not available in most blogging solutions although they wish such tools were. So, I ran the idea by my coder in order to take that mini application and turn it into yet another FREE Plugin for WordPress that will help bloggers write better content, online.

Writing Better Content! WordPress blogging 101

What this next plugin will feature basically centers around the process of writing and the management of resources specific to writing using formats often found in good research writing taught in schools and colleges. So here is a brief summary of what is currently in this plugin and what is pending prior to release. Again, this plugin is being released as a FREE plugin for WordPress.

POST PLANNER PLUGIN FEATURES

When you sit down to write, how do you approach a writing project? For me it always begins with the idea of what the subject should be about and then I write down a clear statement of who the target audience is before I begin to write (in most cases that is). With my audience in mind and an idea of their expectations I write according to those expectations presenting to them my ideas and thoughts related to the subject I write. I may start out with a thesis statement of sorts and certainly an introduction that may either fully set the expectation of the content or I’ll shoot from the hip and use a technique in writing I learned where you take a person one direction only to arrive at another. A common technique in politics you may have noticed.

So what this plugin seeks to do is simple, it seeks to provide you a way to write content based on optional structure and methods of writing while providing essential tools for writing good content.

More than just a collection of available pre formatted fields to fill in, this plugin will feature some basic file management and even analytical tools for testing keyword density and other SEO important things prior to publishing your post or page. Now in the test I have been able to get the keyword analyzer to work rather quickly, but some of the features of the plugin are going to clearly require a person well versed in AJAX and mootools which I’m actively seeking now.

Mark, my programmer, has also assisted me in the creation of the admin interface which will feature a modified version of the FCK editor along with some drop down user defined preselects for rapid publishing of content. With the plugin a writer will be able to organize notes, organize resources, gather files and other media elements, prior to the writing stage. Getting the ducks all in a row as the cliche goes makes the writing process much easier. Now its a lofty goal naturally for some features I have planned but my sincere objective is to make this plugin worthy of serious use by any professional writer or journalist by providing features many in such a line of work would require.

Does this replace the standard POST editor page? In part, yes especially with the addition of some new fields and the customized editor.

I’ll get you a screen shot later today of what we have already come up with.

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