WP Featured Documentation!

Posted on August 15, 2008
Filed Under General |

http://www.jaredritchey.com/featured-listings-plugin/

In two days I’ve gotten 9 emails requesting help for this plug-in. I know I did a quick and un-detailed job on the documentation in part because this version was the one we emailed out to several hundred people that contacted us to test the plug-in. The next release which I’ve added some nice features and other real important enhancements to is better documented. The next release is also 100% Free and has a larger collection of example layouts complete with CSS. But for now, I’ll again try and answer in bulk some important settings requirements to run this plug-in in your site.

WP Featured Requires OpenRealty and WordPress!

Lots of confusion and I’m not sure how as in every single post I make about WP Featured, I’ve made mention that listings are provided by OpenRealty. I have this plug-in working on a half dozen sites with MLS RETS and IDX feeds where there are many thousands of listings. I even have a WordPress MU version working where each agent has a blog in a sub domain and they feature their own listings in their blogs. I know this works but what seems to be escaping people is the need to have OpenRealty installed in your site. The new release again will still require OpenRealty to be on the same domain but the one following that will allow for connection to the OpenRealty site regardless of domain. Until then here is a summary of steps to setup this plug-in.

#1 Install the plug-in and activate it.

The most common issue is that people are not installing the plug-in correctly. To begin, simply extract the Zip file and upload the folder titled “featured-listings” to your plug-in directory. You will end up with a final path like this “wp-content/plugins/featured-listings/”

#2 EDIT the featured listings templates.

In wp-content/plugins/featured-listings/template/ I have a few demo templates so you can see how we use OpenRealty type tags. featured_3.html is the best example to really work from as it has the path example I’m using and it has some CSS in it for simple styling. In the new release when done you won’t need to set so many variables in the actual template files even though controlling the look of your featured result is ideally handled in the template files. You are free to create any that you wish but you MUST keep them in the same naming format in order to use them. featured_# for example. The new release has 14 templates two are slide shows, two have flash, two have internal menu’s and the rest are just examples.

#3 Create a featured listings instance

Another common confusion NOT by design is in relation to “instances”. The featured instances refers only to the instance or instance number of the featured listing format you are using. If you have 5 new posts and in each post you have featured listings then you need 5 instances unless your goal is to write posts and have the same exact set of featured listings in all 5 posts. What that basically means is that If I decide to write a half dozen posts about a particular property I may just use only one instance. In that instance I would have set the parameters for just that property or maybe all properties in the same neighborhood. Thus, an instance does nothing more than provide you a way to have multiple featured listings throughout your site in many formats, criteria, and data sets for flexibility. An Instance is just an instance of your featured listings. This came about because people said “I would like to be able to feature different featured listings on different pages and posts” and our answer was, “create an instance”!

Part of this creation of an instance requires you to set the path to Open Realty from either the perspective of the domain root or the server root. You as mentioned in previous posts you must add the path to Open Realty relative to the server in 95% of the cases. I’ve setup a video for this part in summary, Please View The Video!

#4 Add Featured Listings to your WordPress posts and pages

Again this one seems to be a bit confusing and here is why. People have emailed me that they do all of the above and still get no results. When you add the tag to display your featured listings in your post, many are adding the tag with { featured_3 } thinking it refers to the template they selected when they setup their instance. The correct tag is { featured_3 } ONLY IF your instance number is 3. Now this is confusing and in the new new release we have it to where it will show a list of instances you have created in a drop down list so you don’t accidentally overwrite a previous instance and we have added a feature that if the listing is no longer available then it will revert to a master parameter setting to display all featured listings.

The best way to add instances is in sequence as opposed to MLS# as I have some clients now that wanted to feature a particular property so they created an instance like 348759 which was the MLS#. However once the listing sold there was no need to display it so why keep it. We solved this issue by telling them that you should NOT delete it from your system, simply change its Status to “SOLD” and display it as such. In the event where the site has IDX or RETS thats not always possible. So we suggest that you set the instance numbers as just a basic number of your choosing and set the featured criteria to match your listings so it will revert to alternates nicely.

As it stands, you don’t delete instances, you simply edit them once created. In the third release, not the next one this week, we plan on adding the feature to remove an instance from the DB. Until then just create a logical means of using numbers. It is in my plan to add in a feature that makes management a great deal easier.

I hope this helps with configuration. If not use my contact form and I’ll set it up for you.

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