3 New OpenRealty Addons Pending Release

Posted on June 18, 2009
Filed Under General | 4 Comments

Slide Show Pro Add-on

OpenRealty SSP Slideshow Pro AddonSlideshow pro is one of the nicest and most feature rich flash slideshow and gallery tools available. A commercial product, SSP has been a favorite of mine since we first used it on a real estate site three years ago in place of the OpenRealty default listing_detail_slideshow.html template. With this add-on, we basically use the listing photos to generate the SSP slideshow where the thumbnail images are actually part of the slideshow navigation. I had planned at some point to also include optional additional gallery items in the SSP but realized it would be a bit lofty and likely never used feature. This add-on as with all of my addons is 100% free GNU/GPL. I’ll publish it for download once I hear back from SSP about the use of their logo in my add-on icon. I’ve submitted the add-on to them for review. For those interested in learning more about SlideShow Pro, please visit Slide Show Pro Here.

You will need to either purchase a copy of SSP or use the default swf file I’ve included for your slideshows. Slideshow Pro is in my professional opinion one of the most affordable solutions of its type considering the features and exceptional quality they have built into this product. What you get with my add-on is the code to make SSP work in OpenRealty listings details pages and an example 400×300 slideshow.swf. Once you paste in the template tag, it will render the 400×300 presentation set with basic transitions.

High Slide Add-on

OpenRealty High Slide AddonWhile working on an automotive website using OpenRealty, I had a chance to revive an old beta version of an add-on I had built for use on the WP Featured site after abandoning it for more important project. Our customer really wanted to include a nice way to do a jQuery type ThickBox or ThinBox feature for image presentation. Having worked with the commercial version of the best or should I say coolest JavaScript Thumbnail Sliders on the market, the HighSlide Viewer, I knew this was the way to go. So, wanting to take advantage of an OpenRealty feature for the image captions, we completed this older add-on to work with the latest release of the JS HighSlide Viewer to be a totally hands off feature that generates the viewer automatically including the display of the image caption you add in the OpenRealty image editor. This add-on is free and will be released as soon as I complete the documentation for it. Its a painfully simply add-on that I think you and your clients will certainly enjoy using. To read more about the HighSlide Viewer visit their website. One last quick note about image publishing in OpenRealty;

A QUICK Little Open Realty Tip.

I really like OpenRealty in part because its not exceptionally difficult to modify for some more common or basic features. Take for instance the method used to publish listing details and how the data is stored and presented. OpenRealty fields by and large are pretty basic which makes them easy to customize on a per project basis. There are times I’ll even change the path in the OpenRealty core files used for the display of the nophoto.gif’s default location to look instead to the current template/images/ folder. This allows for template designers to add a custom one matching the design of their theme. But it gets a little better when it comes to the listings management where photos are concerned.

Did you know that in the captions field in OpenRealty you can paste in some basic HTML markup for a better presentation of the caption text? Its true, I routinely modify the core admin panel for clients all the time where we include a very basic GNU/GPL WYSIWYG editor for many of the fields in OpenRealty including the fields saved as “textarea”. Site owners can then include H tags, spans and some other real basic markup which gets rendered in the listings details page. Naturally you don’t need to do any core modifications to paste in your title tags or even paragraph and bolding tags for this simple little tip. But more advanced users will take advantage of this in places like the Agent pages where you can add details about the agent by pasting in full HTML markup for a better looking agent page. More on this later.

Featured Listings Add-on

OpenRealty Featured Listings AddonNext is this very old, very well used, and widely seen in many of our OpenRealty projects across the web; the featured listings addon. I contracted to have this developed by Serious PHP nearly 4 years ago and it worked fine for what we needed. I’ve tested, modified, and updated the code since then and having used this add-on in literally dozens and dozens of websites, it remains one of my most often used in my inventory. This add-on makes the creation of multiple featured listings a breeze. You define the name of your featured listing instance, specify the criteria including number to display, specify vertical, horizontal or animated (all based on the templates you place in for featured listings) and your done. Paste in the generated template tag where you want the featured listings to show and it will render the layout based on your pre-defined templates. Since this uses some of the basic code we use in our Menu Creator, both are being updated for release together. Yes, its 100% free.

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4 Comments so far
  1. Frank June 19, 2009 7:45 am

    Hi Jared,

    I am impressed with all your open-realty enhancements.

    Please tell me where I can download them orsend me the Slide show and High Slide addons when they are available.

    Thanks,
    Frank

  2. Chris Olbekson July 2, 2009 10:24 pm

    I appreciate all the gpl work you do for open-realty. It’s been very helpful in my quest to master the software.

    Any updates on the availability of the slideshowpro plugin? Or would it be possible to get the code for testing and development? The slidepress plugin for wp uses ssp. Thanks!

  3. Jared Ritchey July 5, 2009 9:26 pm

    Slideshow Plugin is ready for download on this very page. Just click the icon.

  4. Chris Olbekson July 10, 2009 4:43 pm

    Hi,
    Could you please provide a download link for the available add-ons. Getting javascript void on all 3 icons. Thanks again for making these available to the general public.


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