I am taking a break from freelance

Posted on January 27, 2010
Filed Under Announcements, Joomla CMS, Open Realty, WordPress Wisdom | Leave a Comment

I’ve decided that I need a break away from freelance work for a while.  Mounting distractions with my relocation and my parents retirement I’ll be spending a lot of time helping them close their sporting goods shop before spring.  Although my move will be much better for future business when I return, there are those little things that make me dread the move. Packing the U-Haul truck, dealing with mail forwarding and phone number changes as the list goes on.  During this period away I will be maintaining all the writing and service maintenance contracts I’m obligated to.  I will continue to accept writing project for the time being since most of the instruments of the trade will be with me most the time.

Recommended IDX RETS MLS providers for WordPress, OpenRealty, Drupal and Joomla

For anyone interested in having their MLS feed for either IDX or RETS installed in their sites you should contact the following people depending on your needs.

WordPress MLS Integration with IDX or RETS

If you need to have your real estate listings put into WordPress I would suggest contacting WPRealty.org which is fully capable of providing this as a service for an exceptionally affordable price.  Alternatively UltimateIDX has a solution that will marry into almost any solution known including WordPress and how UltimateIDX differs is predominantly in the area of CRM related features for contact and lead management. UltimateIDX is only in 8 primary markets at this point but they map and add new markets with greater frequency now that they have moved the company to Las Vegas Nevada. Currently they are mapping for most southern states and California in addition to their existing markets.

OpenRealty MLS Integration with IDX or RETS

To put MLS listings into OpenRealty 2.5.6 – 2.5.8 you should contact WPRealty.org because they have the widest collection of scripts designed for this purpose that I’m aware of. Since WPRealty frequently builds open source real estate websites they are better suited in my opinion to handle your custom IDX / RETS solution.

Drupal Integration with IDX or RETS

For integrating your Drupal site with the IDX or RETS feed again I’d suggest WPRealty.org if your desire is to have your own stand alone solution where you are not obligated to a proprietary solution.  UltimateIDX is ideal for this. You get integration and full CRM features for sales and lead management.

Joomla Integration with IDX or RETS

Joomla is a great solution for Real Estate Websites and a few people come to mind when it comes to components specifically designed for Joomla 1.5.12+  The first component is our own which is titled JRealty and you can acquire a free copy by contacting the WPRealty group.   If however you require the integrated sales and lead management then again, I suggest UltimateIDX.

Each company has their strong points, two of them I know of intimately because I’ve been on their development team for years.  One thing strange about this business is the underlying loyalties that most people are not even aware exist.  Its the kind of business where everyone knows something about the other guy. Well here is the contact details list of those recommended solution providers I know something about.

UltimateIDX IDX / RETS Solutions
The UltimateIDX literally works with any solution I’ve encountered ideally suited for open source applications including those above mentioned along with Drupal, B2 Evolution and even Type Pad. UltimateIDX has a pretty good position in a niche market that provides MLS empowered type back office integration with most open source solutions. I’ve personally built dozens of sites using UltimateIDX and have yet to find a single client that regretted it. UltimateIDX is a paid solution requiring you to host on either their servers or those they have tested to support real estate type websites. UIDX is a grade 1 option.
http://www.ultimateidx.com

WPRealty WordPress Joomla OpenRealty Solutions
WPRealty is branded and serviced under many different titles and company site headings.  The team has many different product variants and has been building OpenRealty, Joomla and WordPress sites since the birth of each of those applications.  The team members are strong supporters of open source applications and can provide professional grade solutions at a fraction of the cost for similar proprietary ones. WPRealty is a grade 1 option.
http://www.wprealty.org

I’ll be back in full swing sometime in June 2010.

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.

Updating – Upgrading to WordPress 2.5

Posted on March 29, 2008
Filed Under WordPress Wisdom | Leave a Comment

Need help upgrading your WordPress to version 2.5?

Having worked with WordPress now going on 2 1/2  years one thing that seems to catch most people by surprise is the compatibility issues with some plug-ins and themes with successive developments. When the introduction of Tags was added to WordPress many themes simply would not work without modification.

For those who may find this a bit of a challenge I would like to extend the offer to perform the updates for you including any minor template fixes or simple modifications to plug-ins in order to bring you up to date with the worlds number one blogging solution.

Upgrading WordPress – $25 per project

Upgrading WordPress – $25 per project for any release from 2.0 to current.  Please feel free to use the contact me page to request an upgrade. 

The price is based on average time of 1 1/2 hours and includes DB and domain backup, compression of code, I remove white spaces from core code, and perform general SEF and SEO examination as part of the update. This examination includes a look at your HTACCESS for things like Canonical URL configuration, image caching, proper redirect and permalinks directives along with removing white space since HTACCESS does not cache the smaller it is the better for performance. I then add a robots.txt files which WordPress does not provide by default.  Most would agree that an update to WordPress is a mere 10 minute job which is true but why stop there when a detailed assessment and proper update and archive should be performed. 

Contact me today for an upgrade to WordPress 2.5

Special note regarding the WordPress 2.5 update process:

WordPress 2.5 does require a database update and I mentioned above that I always make a backup of the entire project folder prior to performing an update. This database update is essential to taking advantage of WordPress’s new features and careful attention to backup and recovery procedures should be followed.

An image just for the sake of putting an image.

update database

WordPress 2.5 Released!

Posted on March 29, 2008
Filed Under WordPress Wisdom | Leave a Comment

Finally after 6 hard months of work the geniuses behind WordPress have released a milestone in blogging called WordPress 2.5.

Eager to get this product installed so all my addons and plugins can be tested I’m taking down my site for one hour to move things into place.

Great work WordPress developers!

WordPress 2.5 Release

Posted on March 18, 2008
Filed Under WordPress Wisdom | Leave a Comment

WordPress 2.5 Release Pending – Templates and Themes Changes?

Well I’m glad to say that in the past month, being on the beta testers subscribers list have netted me a great deal of insight into WordPress 2.5.  If I were asked to summarize WordPress 2.5 I’d simply say "clean and beautiful" as the admin interface is as well organized as any application I’ve seen and the structure of the code makes template modifications with plugins and overwrites truly endless with possibilities.

Today I just reinstalled a fresh copy of the release candidate and tested a few menu ideas I had from one of my old stock templates and I was amazed at how quickly it came together.  One major contributing factor is the structure of the menu in the admin panel and the rest of the layout will make customization a welcome task instead of a chore.

WordPress powers to be hint at the possibility of releasing version 2.5 as early as today.  This news comes at just the right time for me personally as I was able to test my two pet projects for WordPress plug-ins and I’m happy to say that they work just fine.  Although having only been previously released for clients and beta testers, the moment WordPress 2.5 releases I’ll release my new plug-ins, the Featured Listings plug-in and the WP-Post Planner.

WordPress 2.5 Templates and Themes

Naturally my initial concern was any last minute changes to template code and or template tags used in templates and if that code in any way effected the bridging scripts we use for Joomla and or Open Realty. I’m glad to say that only minor modification was required for our registration bridge and the rest works like a charm.  So to are the templates and themes having been built for the 2.3 series of WordPress.

To read more about this release news, please visit this link for WordPress Sneak Peek


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