Open Realty XHTML Compliant

Posted on October 22, 2007
Filed Under Products, Real Estate News |

Creating Compliant Sites with Open Realty

CSS and XHTML compliance was a bit of a challenge in the early days of Open Realty as much of the hard coded layout had been riddled with very old coding methods. Today however Open Realty has made substantial updates to the quality of its PHP and template engine code by adhering closer to the standards and compliance traditions expected or should I say demanded upon by top design professionals and site owners. Although Open Realty still has some minor changes necessary in order to bring the application to the full XHTML Strict compliance, the application runs a great deal leaner and cleaner than previous versions.

Just a few days ago, I had taken the latest version of Open Realty 2.4.3 and went through each and every file changing code elements that were yet to be modified for proper functional specifications of XHTML Strict compliance. Additional modifications to areas of the application where I added a collection styling rules that provide more flexibility and control over the styling of websites. Albeit not a fork by any means, these changes were done for the most part in an attempt to revamp and expand the possibilities of using Open Realty as a stand alone application for things other than a Real Estate script.

The struggle with XHTML or CSS compliance was largely on a per project bases as many designers experienced which had been my motive for maintaining what I’ll call the “production version” of the Open Realty. I frequently do this with applications I work with where I usually correct or modify them to meet design needs. Open Realty seems oblivious to suggestions I make so I feel compelled to release something to assist other designers with similar frustrations.

Open Realty has done a great job with its addon system and it stands to reason that expansion and inclusion of other applications can be achieved to certain degrees with the addon system as it currently exists. This however is not an answer to all situations and nor should it be. Having worked with a great number of integration projects where blogs, cms, crm, mls and idx are used, most integrations have been through direct modification of core files in Open Realty. After looking at this for some time I realized that most of these things could be easily achieved with simple template modifications and some PHP code. Its a hassle to continually update an application that has been modified and as each successive release of Open Realty changes often drastically, the task can be cost prohibitive. So, I’ve come up with a solution that meets the objective of designers and site owners at the same time.

Granted some things in Open Realty do require core modifications still to this day in order to bring it XHTML compliant but these changes are trivial and can usually be done in minutes with Dreamweavers bulk find and replace feature. Seeking out every instance of <b></b> and replacing it with <strong></strong> is a simple task. Having done this many times with those tags among others has become a bit of second nature with every release I keep in inventory. But integration is an all together different animal and having modified the core enough times to not like it, I decided to simply make most integration requests I encounter via a few global control files and some PHP in the actual templates.

Open Realty is loaded with most the code people would need to make it dance, roll over, and beg on demand, its just a matter of getting to it. Use of the addon system is the prescribed method and most commonly used for things people wish to achieve programatically. This however isn’t required and can actually slow down a site substantially.

Since we are lucky that Open Realty allows the parsing of PHP in the template files we have a good deal of control with the functionality of the website which makes integration at the template level a great deal faster and less demanding on resources than using the addon system. As mentioned above the addon system is well thought out and a great deal leaner than previous releases but may be overkill for some very basic tasks like echoing the number of listings in a link to say, residential properties or maybe displaying google maps using the google API. Google provides enough code necessary to work cleanly with Open Realty without the need to create an addon to display a map for a particular property on the listing details page. Having done this among other things with the template structure, it becomes obvious that the speed in a site can be greatly increased by use of this technique.

Open Realty 2.4.3 Administrative - Admin Template

I’ve released a new XHTML compliant administrative template based entirely on CSS rules that have been tested and work well. I’ve included a few configuration files that gives site owners the power to adjust and modify the admin section of their Open Realty site to such a degree that maintenance and control of their site as a whole becomes much easier. The idea behind these modifications is to create an admin panel that works well across commercial as well as personal websites. Image is everything sometimes and a well organized administrative panel can lend a great deal to the perceived quality of an application. Since the template requires the admin.inc.php file to be modified its not likely you will want to use this template in your standard release version of open realty. I will however create a modified version of the template before I publish them to the site for download later today.

Should you decide to use the full version of the template then making a backup of your admin.inc.php file is advised before you upload the modified version. Options was the name of the game at the request of many clients so I’ve created a few unique features that you can chose to use or not to use at your discretion.

I’ll first get these applied to an assortment of my client sites before publishing them for download. Successive releases will be maintained as Open Realty continues with its development. A guide on how to bring the application to full XHTML compliance and a list of changes made to the admin.inc.php file are well documented.

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1 Comment so far
  1. Paul Zubrys December 28, 2007 7:44 pm

    How can I contact you to discuss work on a CMS/Open-Realty/CRM project?

    Paul Zubrys
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