Three New Plug-ins Released

Posted on June 10, 2009
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This week we released three FREE plug-ins for WordPress and one for OpenRealty which extends client contact management features to OpenRealty sites. These three plugins have actually been built initially to solve a few issues with some of the UltimateIDX client sites. Google PPC (pay per click) is growing in usage with many real estate websites and as a result, we have found that there are times the increase in traffic can sometimes coincide with an MLS update rendering the PPC page to error out or time out. To stay on top of this and other elements of real estate website design we have released the following three plugins.

WP Critical Page Monitor

From UltimateIDX, the WordPress Critical Page Monitor does little more than ping a user defined set of pages via a CRON job keeping the status of the page responder in sync with the CPM. When the CPM encounters a time out or a response other than a valid response it will send the site administrator an email and an SMS message. When your PPC page goes down, regardless of the page status, you still pay money for each and every click that comes via the Google PPC. This tool was developed for the purpose of monitoring the pages you invest PPC into. You can download the plug-in FREE OF CHARGE on the UltimateIDX site once WordPress approves it for their extensions directory. I hope to have documentation done by weeks end.

WP Random Content

This was initially built to save us the headache of having to always fix changes to one of our client sites where he would break the template layout by trying to change random hard coded elements and images. Frustrated with the endless support and fixes I decided to create a plug-in to make the changes he wanted a much easier task without having to modify the core theme files. This plug-in does one thing and one thing only, it randomizes anything you put into it. From text, advertising code, links, images, banners, even post elements. Simply navigate to the plug-in interface in WordPress, add the elements or images you wish to randomize and you are done. Can work without widget enabled templates but is ideal with them. Again this plug-in is 100% free. A version for OpenRealty is also ready to roll and is also 100% free GNU / GPL which you can request by email until I have a chance to finish up my download page. You may have noticed I’ve been working on that page to clean it up in preparation to release all of our addons. I’m done with commercial OpenRealty addons, all of my addons are now 100% free.

WP News Feed

This plug-in actually came out of an idea presented by a friend of mine at the University of Washington I call the “U of W Super Blogger”. For about a year, I’ve been using a little RSS tool called Simple Pie RSS that was hard coded into a Yahoo tabbed set of PHP pages I created to do my daily check list with. When my friend looked at the idea, he suggested we make it a WordPress plug-in because such a tool would eliminate many of his time consuming search for industry related news. Most people subscribe to RSS feeds via their email program or by using an online service as we have come to learn. Since Mark is a super blogger, I take his suggestions serious. Let me explain a little how it works and why we went forward in creating it.

With my RSS empowered daily check list, I run down my normal list of links to client sites (I like to stay on top of them to see how they are ranking in the SERPS) and I read over notifications from the servers among other things like stats and such which I’ve had coded into this tool of mine. One of the most valuable features is that I have multiple RSS feeds plugged into a Yahoo Tabbed interface which I use to follow industry news from many of my favorite blogs, forums and news wires. Now, although Google and other online services do have a feature to allow something similar, we decided to create the WP News Feed WordPress plug-in to provide the blogger with a clean and easy to use tool for adding RSS feeds to the admin panel. Since tabs would be a bit messy if the number of feeds went beyond say 5 or 6, we opted instead to use a jQuery accordion type feature that puts each successive RSS feed in its own accordion container. Once installed, I simply add the RSS feeds I stay on top of, set the number of items to display, give the feeds a title and I’m set ready to go. Now I have a quick and easy way to look for new things to blog about. I get to add in all my favorite blogs like the Bryan Ruby CMS Report, WordPress news and Joomla news among others giving me a little bit of a euphoric sense of being informed by staying on top of those things that interest me related to my industry. There you have it. The plug-in, as usual, is 100% free GNU / GPL. Before I forget, I would like to extend my gratitude and thanks to Damian Danielczyk for helping us fix and produce cleaner code for working releases of all of our recent plugins.

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