WordPress Menu Manager

Posted on August 25, 2008
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We just finished some final edits for the first release of The Brokers Edge WordPress “Menu Creator” aka “Menu Manager” and it is now ready for use. The menu creator was designed in response to clients who needed a way to control the menus on their WordPress blogs. With the FREE WordPress plugin users can not only add content items to any number of menus they can add external links as well.

The WordPress Menu Creator / Manager produces a standard unordered list output which is so common for CSS and JS menus today and can support multiple levels. The WordPress Menus can then be easily edited, managed and positioned within your WordPress templates. One of the nice features about the WordPress menu manager is the ability to change the display order of the menu items as you see fit.

Anyone interested in this item should contact us today or visit The Brokers Edge

WordPress and Open Source for Realtors

Posted on August 15, 2008
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The UltimateIDX adds FREE WordPress Plug-in to inventory

The UltimateIDX (UltimateRETS) which is owned by The Brokers Edge added a new tool for putting its UltimateIDX Featured Listings directly into your WordPress blog. Similar in some ways as the WP Featured plug-in, the UIDX version is designed for people who use the UltimateIDX CRM system in their real estate WordPress blog.

For those who don’t know, The UltimateIDX is a full blown client resource and contact management system built specifically by broker guided programmers for Real Estate Agents, Brokers and Offices. Motivated in part by the industries consistent and growing frustration with proprietary solutions, The Brokers Edge recognized the massive migration of Real Estate professionals to open source solutions like WordPress, Joomla, Drupal and others when they set out to build this masterpiece. This is where the plug-in fits the bill for maximizing a Realtors marketing efforts.

The WordPress plug-in takes UIDX MLS listings and puts a featured block in the sidebar or directly into your WordPress posts and pages. The criteria and sort method is all template tag controlled and provides Realtors who love to blog a way of displaying listings in their content to better enhance their marketing efforts.

Only the arrogant would call this exclusive. Other competing services are likely to copy this plug-in feature for their own solutions I can almost guarantee it but, UltimateIDX is not so easy to replicate as the project has been a lofty endeavor with facets to long to list here. I told members in our forum that I’d venture a wager against my own “self proclaimed insight” into this industry that if a competing plug-in does not surface with other providers in the next few months then I clearly have no clue about this industry. My gut feeling says, given the traffic to my own plug-in and the IP tracking we have done watching competitors visit the sites, most of us are convinced that the decision UltimateIDX made by providing this (and other) plug-ins to Realtors was a wise one.

One of its most clever features is that the UltimateIDX does NOT require you to iFrame in the MLS listings and it does not require quirky looking sub-domains or other types of hack ins that similar products often do. Now in my business I don’t seek to disparage any particular product on the market, but if I were a Realtor, I’d certainly consider the option to be free from proprietary costly solutions and opt in instead for one that works with tools I like to use, like Joomla for instance.

The UltimateIDX - UltimateRETS with Joomla, WordPress and even OpenRealty

It is the single most impressive feature about UltimateIDX in my opinion. The ability to take this clever system and plug it into literally ANY existing website that is at least “basically” standards compliant in design. That means Joomla integration with the RETS or IDX isn’t a problem, even WordPress and IDX or Rets wont hold you up. Just weeks ago, I tested it in an OpenRealty setting and again, not a hitch to be found.

The ability for the UltimateIDX to be plugged into any website with key features like SEF URL’s and awesome lead management abilities makes the UltimateIDX an ideal solution for true real estate professionals. You package this baby up in recognition of the steady trend of Realtors migrating away from proprietary solutions to those that are open source, you end up with a product that actually liberates the Realtor with a myriad of options. The UltimateIDX works with open source like bacon does with eggs. Toss in the plug-in and now you have the added bonus of a hot cup of coffee.

But is UltimateIDX only about open source? Not at all! UltimateIDX sought to work with these solutions knowing that Realtors were likely to gravitate to open source in part because open source is widely supported, less expensive, more compliant and often better built than proprietary solutions but open source is NOT the only market for UltimateIDX. As mentioned above UltimateIDX works with any existing website solution providing the site is at least basically standards compliant and can work on a Linux or LAMP type server (although not exclusively required.). That means home grown websites too, like those built with Dreamweaver or maybe something as simple as a MS Front Page website. UIDX isn’t limited to other peoples technologies by and large.

WordPress Featured Listings too WordPress Realty

My pet project was my little plug-in called WP Featured which was a way for me to answer Realtors needs to put MLS and IDX listings in their WordPress content via an easy to use template tag to feature those listings. But taking off from that, a programmer decided that he can do better. So, he built the CMSRealty for Joomla equivalent for WordPress but with full support for WordPress permalinks and its called WordPress Realty or WP Realty for short.

With WP Realty you can take OpenRealty as a listings manager solution and put it directly into WordPress “WITHOUT” integration. The method being used is called CURL or Curling in the app features. This provides a way for Realtors to manage listings on their domain in the industries ONLY fully functional open source real estate solution (Open Realty) and combine it with the powerful and feature rich WordPress abilities to rank well in search engines.

The plug-in is 100% FREE for any users of either product, providing that some adherence is agreed to. Its FREE so long as you leave in the RSS Announcement features in the admin panel in tact and leave the link back inclusion in the summary items list. The plug-in will come in a commercial version that will include a turn key real estate website built using the CMS features of WordPress blogs with IDX or RETS starting at $299 to $599. That’s a complete out the door thank you mam have a good day deal for 1/3 the price of the industry average type deal. So effective is this package, it will keep struggling Realtors off welfare as financing for the solution is also being offered providing hosting is included. MORE ON THIS LATER

I’ll post more on this after they get a demo up for you hopefully this weekend as projected. Now some may freak a little bit about that given my past promises to get something posted only to be delayed weeks sometimes months. My bad, client work always comes first. However, I’m happy to say this IS NOT a Jared Ritchey personal project thing so its likely to happen on schedule.

To see more about these products visit the UltimateIDX and The Brokers Edge directly.

WP Featured Documentation!

Posted on August 15, 2008
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http://www.jaredritchey.com/featured-listings-plugin/

In two days I’ve gotten 9 emails requesting help for this plug-in. I know I did a quick and un-detailed job on the documentation in part because this version was the one we emailed out to several hundred people that contacted us to test the plug-in. The next release which I’ve added some nice features and other real important enhancements to is better documented. The next release is also 100% Free and has a larger collection of example layouts complete with CSS. But for now, I’ll again try and answer in bulk some important settings requirements to run this plug-in in your site.

WP Featured Requires OpenRealty and WordPress!

Lots of confusion and I’m not sure how as in every single post I make about WP Featured, I’ve made mention that listings are provided by OpenRealty. I have this plug-in working on a half dozen sites with MLS RETS and IDX feeds where there are many thousands of listings. I even have a WordPress MU version working where each agent has a blog in a sub domain and they feature their own listings in their blogs. I know this works but what seems to be escaping people is the need to have OpenRealty installed in your site. The new release again will still require OpenRealty to be on the same domain but the one following that will allow for connection to the OpenRealty site regardless of domain. Until then here is a summary of steps to setup this plug-in.

#1 Install the plug-in and activate it.

The most common issue is that people are not installing the plug-in correctly. To begin, simply extract the Zip file and upload the folder titled “featured-listings” to your plug-in directory. You will end up with a final path like this “wp-content/plugins/featured-listings/”

#2 EDIT the featured listings templates.

In wp-content/plugins/featured-listings/template/ I have a few demo templates so you can see how we use OpenRealty type tags. featured_3.html is the best example to really work from as it has the path example I’m using and it has some CSS in it for simple styling. In the new release when done you won’t need to set so many variables in the actual template files even though controlling the look of your featured result is ideally handled in the template files. You are free to create any that you wish but you MUST keep them in the same naming format in order to use them. featured_# for example. The new release has 14 templates two are slide shows, two have flash, two have internal menu’s and the rest are just examples.

#3 Create a featured listings instance

Another common confusion NOT by design is in relation to “instances”. The featured instances refers only to the instance or instance number of the featured listing format you are using. If you have 5 new posts and in each post you have featured listings then you need 5 instances unless your goal is to write posts and have the same exact set of featured listings in all 5 posts. What that basically means is that If I decide to write a half dozen posts about a particular property I may just use only one instance. In that instance I would have set the parameters for just that property or maybe all properties in the same neighborhood. Thus, an instance does nothing more than provide you a way to have multiple featured listings throughout your site in many formats, criteria, and data sets for flexibility. An Instance is just an instance of your featured listings. This came about because people said “I would like to be able to feature different featured listings on different pages and posts” and our answer was, “create an instance”!

Part of this creation of an instance requires you to set the path to Open Realty from either the perspective of the domain root or the server root. You as mentioned in previous posts you must add the path to Open Realty relative to the server in 95% of the cases. I’ve setup a video for this part in summary, Please View The Video!

#4 Add Featured Listings to your WordPress posts and pages

Again this one seems to be a bit confusing and here is why. People have emailed me that they do all of the above and still get no results. When you add the tag to display your featured listings in your post, many are adding the tag with { featured_3 } thinking it refers to the template they selected when they setup their instance. The correct tag is { featured_3 } ONLY IF your instance number is 3. Now this is confusing and in the new new release we have it to where it will show a list of instances you have created in a drop down list so you don’t accidentally overwrite a previous instance and we have added a feature that if the listing is no longer available then it will revert to a master parameter setting to display all featured listings.

The best way to add instances is in sequence as opposed to MLS# as I have some clients now that wanted to feature a particular property so they created an instance like 348759 which was the MLS#. However once the listing sold there was no need to display it so why keep it. We solved this issue by telling them that you should NOT delete it from your system, simply change its Status to “SOLD” and display it as such. In the event where the site has IDX or RETS thats not always possible. So we suggest that you set the instance numbers as just a basic number of your choosing and set the featured criteria to match your listings so it will revert to alternates nicely.

As it stands, you don’t delete instances, you simply edit them once created. In the third release, not the next one this week, we plan on adding the feature to remove an instance from the DB. Until then just create a logical means of using numbers. It is in my plan to add in a feature that makes management a great deal easier.

I hope this helps with configuration. If not use my contact form and I’ll set it up for you.

WP Featured v1.3 Features

Posted on August 14, 2008
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Working on this late last night I factored in a way to have nifty little featured slider although not automatic as I’d like. I did this so it could be used in places where space is limited. My idea is to have the listings slide from right to left on the click of an arrow button.

I’ve also added in some support for OpenRealty SEF URL’s since this previous version would only display the listingID in the URL and not the actual SEF title. Adding this feature lead me to a discovery of sorts where Open Realty’s SEF feature may possibly break certain aspects of a site.

I discovered that in OpenRealty version 2.5.2 the that when SEF URL’s are set to use “hyphens” it can cause problems with any site element that is “hyphenated”. I sent that info to OpenRealty Guru Mick for possible bug analysis to see if it can be verified by someone else too. I noticed that with SEF urls set, any background images in my css that were preceded with a hyhpenated word would be excluded and not show up. Also sub folders with hyphens would not work nor pre-defined search results that were added to the HTACCESS file. For instance if I set the background image for the search results template to be residential-background.png it would not show until I changed it to residentialback.png for instance.

This kept me many many hours bug hunting trying to figure out what I was doing wrong since the SEF feature in this newest version has a few hyphenated paths for the mootools and RSS stuff. I can change it if need be, but if it is a tiny little bug in OpenRealty, I figured they would want to know about it.

People beat me up a great deal about how nasty this site is and how unreliable the downloads are and such. I take no offense to truth. I’ve got it on my project log to be fixed. Thanks for feedback even if to slap me around.

New WordPress OpenRealty Component

Posted on July 25, 2008
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Taking the WordPress Featured Plug-in Forward — NEW RELEASE

Many months ago we built three plug-ins designed to work in ways that would benefit people in the Real Estate business which were tested but really only downloaded a hundred or so times. Were our efforts pointless? Not exactly! What I did was rebuild all the plugins to work in a more complete way, meaning we added in features cutting edge real estate sites would benefit from.

This weekend I’ll re-post the plug-in from the previous build along with several new small snippets. A new site was built to handle the latest and greatest of these tools and I’ll announce that this week.

The new product is a commercial product and has several optional features and includes that make it ideal for a complete Realtor website solution.

I know this is vague and I know this comes as little importance to many who have asked for the previous component and did not receive it. I apologize for past events and delays in releasing components that I’ve promised to release and had not. These new ones are worth the wait.

WordPress Featured Listings Plugin v1.0.2

Posted on June 5, 2008
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I updated the featured listings plugin over the weekend and added in 3 new features. The new plugin has RSS and some image sizing utilities added for easier management of images. I’ve also added some documentation on how to include some of the new tags we put in to the templates. I’ve added 5 new designs and a video tutorial as well. Enjoy.


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