I’ve also been able to motivate them to include my featured listings addon along with something I’m extremely proud of (I’ll reveal what later) that works in Open Realty as an add-on.

Let me know where I can help.

I got started with coding mostly as a fun hobby as something to occupy my mind and provide stress relief and fun. After 4-5 years of answering the same questions over and over again on the forums coupled with putting up with personal attacks on me, my character, my unwillingness to basically write complete addons for free for people in need and there were plenty of times I was quite short with people. No excuse really but it is life. Not making excuses at all but PBFlash spends even more time on the forums than I do answering questions so, I can only imagine his frustration.

After a few months away from Open-Realty I’m a bit refreshed and having a lot more fun again, hence the progress being made with 2.5 lately.

Anyways, enough of hijacking Jared’s blog and back on topic.

Jared was correct in his other blog post about EZProRealty, it sounds very promising and Open-Realty will likely add some new features taking a cue from EZProRealty. I already commited #4 to the SVN tonight for 2.5.

The GLOBALS.PHP idea is interesting. I personally find the addon system very easy and for my wife’s site I basically use the same idea of the GLOBALS.PHP, I have a single addon that I add template tags for any new functionality I need to it. Maintaining a single addon and just adding to it makes things very quick and simple along the same lines as the Globals.php idea.

Ryan and anyone involved will be given credit and I did verify that the class based templates with featured listings and search results was in the Open Realty core at one point but never spoke of or even revealed and when I read the features list on EZ Pro Realty it stood out to me as something new. It was my assumption that it was the result of their work.

I can verify however that many features in EZProRealty came directly from my archives and addons including PDF support, CSV, Google Maps, Featured Listings manager, integrated SQL menu management, bridges for vTiger, WordPress and even Joomla are my personal contributions to the project not to mention the new admin interface and collection of default templates.

I’m not an enemy of Open Realty at all just so you know.

Although I’m glad you have this fork in the works my only concern is if Ryan will still get credit as I see you preach credit where credit is due. Also Mick is right about the feature for listing details and search results by class for custom templates. I’m curious when the demo of the fork will be out and if there is any plans to share code with Open Realty.

Thanks for your continued responses, they are greatly appreciated.

Also, didn’t think about it till there was a post on the OR forums just now but you can do the featured listings on top of the search results in Open-Realty already using multiple sortby’s/sorttype’s although at the moment if the end user clicks on another sort option then it will clear both the existing sortby’s and the featured ones won’t be first any longer.

For example the URL to view all listings with featured ones first then the rest sorted by price would look like this:

index.php?action=searchresults&sortby=
listingsdb_featured,price&sorttype=DESC,ASC

Perhaps a config option in 2.5 to be able to choose to keep them static on top of the search results will appear soon.

Mick the feature for class specific templates allows a person to have a separate listings-details page and separate search result based entirely upon property class and then some additional features.

I sent through Open Realty extensively a month ago when I completed my Dreamweaver Extension for template building which I took down to add in the new menu code. I’m not sure how I missed the feature you suggested but I’m glad to see we are on the same line of thought as far as features should be.

One comment on #1, while we use template areas for simplicity in the Open-Realty listing detail templates users are free to use template tags for specific listing fields for much greater control over the placement and design of the fields on the search results and listing detail templates, that combined with the ability to have class specific listing detail and search result template I think covers this feature and is already included in Open-Realty and has been for some time.

For Kelly, I’m sorry posts were deleted, I don’t think any of us delete posts unless they are obvious spam or serve no purpose other than trolling. If you’ve had problems with this in the past let me know you OR Forum username and I’ll look into why your posts were deleted. If I can’t figure it out then make a new post and send me the link to it and I’ll monitor it and see what happens to it. If somebody is deleting it for no reason then I will have Ryan deal with them.

Brianna, sorry I came off as an ass. I do tend to be short with people on the forums from time to time. Unfortunately, I have a stressful job and sometimes I allow that stress to get transferred to the forum responses instead of remaining professional. I volunteer a ton of my rare free time to working on Open-Realty and making it better and answering forum posts, helping people setup sites and even personally troubleshooting people’s sites. I’m sorry I didn’t get a chance to give you that experience.

###### Edited by Jared
I edited this post to remove the link to your site only because it did not resolve. Please send me the link and I’ll add it back.

As to the forums at Open Realty deleting posts. Kelly this is par for the course for many forums. In fact I know of one forum that if you even moderate another real estate forum its grounds for being banned. Since these forums in question are just small companies they are of no consequence but what is most funny is that they have the big corporation idea of keeping the masses dictated to and enslaved. We are at that time in history when spinning and censorship are common practice. You WILL NEVER EXPERIENCE that in the EZ Pro Realty forums nor will you in any of the forums I moderate and or administer around the web.

Quite frankly, anyone fearing slavery and control should avoid forums that behave in such a way. Censorship takes place most often where fear is present and control is desired. When you are condemned for asking questions or even pointing out challenges, then freedom has already been lost.

### LAST EDITED BY JARED 03/24/08 ###