Open Realty Fork Pending?

Posted on February 26, 2008
Filed Under Real Estate News |

Open Realty Listings Manager Apparently Forked

Updated March 10th 2008 with Fork Name.

I received an email this afternoon from a company that has apparently forked the mega popular open source real estate tool, Open Realty.  EZ Pro Realty, seeks to bring several products together in hopes of creating a better off the shelf product for entry level agencies.

Although only sparse details were explained to me, the demo I was able to visit shows great promise.  I was able to notice almost instantly that the same old Open Realty structure was present on the surface, but diving into the demo site revealed some very interesting developments I’ll get to in a moment.

Will Open Realty copy its features?

I had asked the developers of the fork if they felt Open Realty would follow suite and copy features they now offer in the fork.  They boldly answer that they do not care if Open Realty takes every single one of their features and implements them. They further state that they wanted to set precedence for features Open Realty should have had from the beginning and that they had thought of offsetting such potential reversal of implementation in hopes both products would meet industry standards.  The developer states that the decision to offset the potential of reverse implementation of features takes place by creating similar features found in some of the Open Realty commercial add-ons that have been made available.  As some may know, Open Realty members do publish commercial add-ons ranging in price and features that most would agree are useful. 

This does however make perfect sense as the chat session with the developer went on to explain that Open Realty sits as the bare minimum a real estate listing script should be in terms of features and function and that in order to bring Open Realty to the industry standard as expected by Realtors, the inclusion of commercial add-ons was required.   Chad basically said this goes contrary to their belief and commercial add-ons available for Open Realty are features that are standard in his fork.  I have mixed emotions about such a philosophy as I myself use to publish commercial add-ons for Open Realty until I realized that every commercial effort I made for add-ons would be eventually copied or duplicated for use in or by Open Realty anyway so all of mine are now free.

Chad, the developer of the fork states, "commercial products being sold by various members of Open Realty are the kinds of features that should have been core in Open Realty and will be core in this fork".  In the developers notes on the demo, its described that the "forks" shall have features that should rarely be commercial and only in the instances of its use for highly customized solutions will commercial extensions exist. I guess we call that good news from an end users perspective. None the less, after only brief examination of the features I discovered the following complements to the fork;

  • CSV Loader
  • Custom Contact forms with SMS features
  • Google Maps
  • IDX management features
  • Enhanced Template Engine that offers a great deal more control for designers
  • PDF Support native with some clever use of predefined PDF templates.
  • Fully customizable featured listings rotator
  • Compare Listings Feature
  • Similar Listings Feature
  • Menu Management from the addon by embarques
  • Live Chat Monitor

And so much more with much of the changes being hidden from me.  I was unable to log into the admin panel or even visit the /admin directory of the forks demo but it was explained to me that the new admin panel seeks to achieve many things not entirely related to the listing manager. 

Having discovered my blog in a google search regarding my new plugin, the developers of this fork had asked me if they could include some of my specific Open Realty add-ons I have in inventory.  I naturally zipped up the entire inventory I had and send them over.

Open Realty Fork - WordPress Listings Plugin?

Does this information suck! Now I have to start writing for yet another Real Estate application and may need to potentially offer a variant of my WordPress Listings Plug-in for this fork.  Naturally my initial concern was that my pet project the FREE plugin for WordPress.  Even though I’ll be releasing the plug-in this week, I’ll likely have to alter it to work with the fork should it ever come to fruition.  As It was explained to me the fork makes only a half dozen real changes to the database structure and only a few dozen changes to the overall method featured listings and other property details are displayed so pulling the data with my WordPress plugin should be a minor modification.

For those who are not familiar my plug-in basically provides a way to display Open Realty Featured listings in your WordPress posts.   With that in mind, I thought given the super nice features in the fork, my including it as another tool for WordPress Real Estate sites would only strengthen the triplicate solutions in building effective real estate sites I use so frequently, Open Realty, Joomla and WordPress.

I guess we see how the fork goes as they release it in just 10 days with domains and support channels already in place.  All I can say in summary is that its about time.

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3 Comments so far
  1. Johan February 27, 2008 3:59 am

    Hi Good luck with your efforts and sharing this info. I am looking forward to read more on this story and am waiting ;-) for the open realty real estate featured listing for wordpress. Johan

  2. Jared Ritchey February 27, 2008 11:11 am

    Yes I’ll post a link once they answer my email giving me permission to do so.

  3. Open Realty Fork Discovered - Real Estate Forums February 27, 2008 11:12 am

    [...] you to examine. Its online and I looked at it and I’m impressed. I wrote about this in my blog too Open Realty Fork ~ Jared __________________ http://www.JaredRitchey.com Where I work Where I [...]


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