Open Realty WordPress Listings Plugin

Posted on February 11, 2008
Filed Under Products, Real Estate Websites |

Real Estate Listings Plugin - WordPress - ReEvaluated

10 months ago I commissioned a programmer to complete a plugin for use in WordPress that would offer some basic listing management features for Realtors that use WordPress as their primary CMS.  Successfully, yet unfortunately more expensive than I had wanted to spend, we were able to get the plugin to work pretty effectively.  After several beta versions and much discussion among Realtors that financed the plugin, it became painfully obvious that the list of features could continue to grow to a point that the burden and performance concerns related to WordPress would prove counter productive. Mind you, WordPress is fully capable of handling an insane amount of usage and traffic, but the heavier you make the application by packing it with plugins and hacks the slower it becomes.  I needed to avoid this at all costs knowing what I know about servers, as I own several for Realtor hosting. So what next? Well first lets go off track and off subject then lets come back to the subject to better articulate why this change in the WordPress listings manager has taken place.

Keeping Applications Separate Yet Together - Going Off Track!

I have always been an advocate for keeping applications separate as much as possible.  When I take on projects where integration is used, the first thing I seek to do is to keep things separate in their relative use and intention as I try to avoid creating a heavy solution that attempts to be the jack of all things.   By example; I’ve always avoided the integration by plugin or component with the marriage of applications such as Joomla and say for instance a forum solution.  Although these types of plugins make sense to some site owners, these types of configurations are ideal where there isn’t a great deal of expected growth.  Such integration is known to professionals as actually counter productive and counter compliant to the very premise of what good web based solutions are made up of.

Professional web sites managed by actual staff or people allocated to the maintenance of such sites usually have duties specific to that area of the site in their charge.  Its rarely the case that large professional sites seek or attempt to integrate multiple facets into a one for all grand daddy solution.  Although I have come across some commercial sites where a forum may appear to be fully part of the CMS, it’s actually not that common and those experts who maintain corporate sites will rarely if ever consider such a method. Why?  Well for good reason actually as I’ll briefly elaborate herein as I continue on.

Although its not the norm for corporate websites to try and jack their CMS with the integration of Forums, Galleries, Blogs, the MLS and even advertising management, solutions for doing these types of integration are freely abundant.  I’ll use Advertising management as the example to articulate why such integration simply isn’t necessary.

I’ll articulate my motive by using a popular tool called OpenAds as an example application.  The advertising management solutions like OpenAds were built specifically for full blown advertising management with the exception of billing and finance related to the sales of ads.  Most would plainly see the duality in the argument that such things as billing would be a beneficial addition to an ad management solution.  One might say that a billing feature would be clearly beneficial in the case of a news paper that sells classifieds either in print or online.  Yet others may argue that invoicing and accounting are best handled by an accounting and invoicing solution.  Valid arguments?  We move on to expand on this a bit.

Advertising management is used to manage advertising, and the logical conclusion should be easily identified that the need for things like blogs or a gallery would prove pointless to integrate even if the site featured either.  So, I then pose a conclusion drawn on or based on questions I’ve asked myself about the need to integrate.  I’m sure countless other variants of this question have been raised elsewhere, I simply asked  "why integrate by inclusion (wrapping or extending) as opposed to just bridging of simple features"? Asking questions usually gets answers and I’m comfortable in those answers I’ve come to rely on.

A content management system (CMS) is for managing content, pages, some static and some dynamic that is generally used as the bulk front end to many corporate level sites.  A CMS has no business functioning as a forum and certainly should never function as a shopping cart. Yet we see these types of integrations all over the web.  But please look carefully at those you see integrated and you may discover as I did that those types of sites are usually one man operations with a generous following attempting to be larger than they possibly can be.  Following the shopping cart example, every instance of shopping cart / CMS I looked at will clearly not work on large scale ventures.  Wouldn’t it be easier to just create a CMS theme, a shopping cart theme, a blog theme and keep each application separate for use as its intended by design to be used for?

Before we get  "back on track" regarding the WordPress Listings Plugin, I wanted to drop in some keywords, not for google or search engines but for you and your brain to hash out the logic behind this separate yet integrated methodology.  Not to impress you but to impress upon you the pointless notion that making integrated applications the final solution to all solutions should be the conclusion of the sensible and responsible webmaster as a thing NOT to do.  A CMS is a CMS, a Blog is a Blog, a Shopping  Cart is a Shopping Cart and none of them should function as a facet of one of the other. The keywords are WordPress Blog, Open Realty Real Estate Listing Manager, Joomla Content Management System, vBulletin Member Forums, ZenCart Shopping Cart Solutions each of which can be cross bridged for the sharing of features necessary to your site objective while remaining as cleverly search engine optimized as can be by simply keeping them separate.  That being said lets go back on track.

Open Realty with WordPress for Realtors - Back On Track

For those reasons above, I’ve avoided putting Open Realty in Joomla or WordPress in Joomla even though the temptation to do so given the available plugins that make such integration possible and relatively easy.

Although arguably WordPress is the worlds premier blogging solution, making it function as a listing manager proved to myself and various Realtors to be similar to using your sports car to haul lumber.  Sure, you can tie a stack of 2.x4’s across the hood and easily get away with it, but that doesn’t mean you should.  WordPress is a blog solution and more recently in projects is a mini CMS solution.  The original idea as previously mentioned was to publish real estate listings inside of a Realtor’s blog.  That part is a great idea, but we discovered that we had a bad approach to doing this.

The new solution does what we feel most comfortable doing and that is keeping applications bridged and not integrated per se.  Open Realty for example is essentially a gallery script for real estate listings and its best suited for the presentation and management of those listings.  Its easy enough to build an OpenRealty site and even randomize WordPress features directly in Open Realty templates as we have done on countless agent sites, but displaying listings or even featured listings in WordPress has been approached with minimalistic results which actually prompted the development of the WordPress Listings Plugin. 

WordPress - Open Realty - Integrate vs Bridge

After working with The Brokers Edge and seeing first hand the needs of Realtors on a more specific level, we come to learn that we can build a site effectively for search engines and even integrate a half dozen applications for each agent relatively comfortable in use.  Now however, we are starting to discover that over time, the best solutions are actually NOT integrated.  Based on this time grown wisdom of trial and error coupled with new discoveries in watching many client websites climb in Google, we discover that the new solution actually works with my basic philosophy having proved itself valid.  Don’t integrate, BRIDGE!

Here is a brief snap shot of the work in progress.  My coder assures me that this will be available by months end and naturally, as a replacement for the former project, it will in fact remain FREE of charge.

Open Realty WP Plugin

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7 Comments so far
  1. Stever February 12, 2008 11:28 am

    Now I’m rethinking my plans for a similar plugin :(

  2. Jared Ritchey February 12, 2008 11:35 am

    Would you like to collaborate on this project and we could get it to market quicker.

  3. Thomas February 13, 2008 11:02 pm

    Hello,

    I am very excited about this plugin and can´t wait to implement it into my website http://www.virtualloscabos.com

    Best Regards,

    Thomas Szott

  4. WordPress | Real Estate MLS IDX RETS | Plugin » Jared Ritchey Design February 15, 2008 5:18 pm

    [...] plugin was first introduced HERE! as a replacement for the previous attempt by creating a mini application inside of WordPress which [...]

  5. William Bryant March 6, 2008 7:07 pm

    how is the bridge coming along? since it’s been almost a month since the posting?

  6. Jared Ritchey March 10, 2008 6:21 am

    Its completed, just drafting a details page but you can download it in the downloads section.

  7. Thomas March 17, 2008 10:53 pm

    Hello Jared,

    I´m still wondering when you will make this real estate plugin available.

    thanks,
    Thomas.


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