WP Featured Example

Posted on August 13, 2008
Filed Under Real Estate Websites |


there aren't listings with those search criterias

I’ve been busy beyond belief I broke free for a few minutes to visit my site after a month and get some things cleaned up. I’ve got the newest WP Featured ready for download but will not load it up until later in the week. For now you can visit the download link on the right for the version 1.2 of this plug-in or simply click here >> Featured Listings Plugin

Here is an example using a default template (featured_3.html) which has no styling so you can see basically how this works. Sorry for such crapy documentation, I’ve been pretty busy with RETS and IDX stuff for OpenRealty projects.

Quick WP Featured Listings Video Tutorial

IMPORTANT WP Featured Listings Configuration Notes

A few quick configuration notes This plug-in was the second release and it has some code issues I’ve since fixed and I’ve updated to work with 2.6+ of WordPress and I promise to get that uploaded in the next few days. There have been dozens and dozens of emails regarding an error this produces when trying to display listings so I’m going to clear that up in bulk right here.

The issue is the same in nearly every case and what happens is the field where you enter the path to open realty needs to be EXACT or it simply will not work.

If for example you have OpenRealty installed in /realestate/ as I do and you enter into the WP Featured admin panel for the path to OpenRealty as /realestate/ it will most likely work but on some servers it will toss an error. Because of this you may have to enter the location from the server root which means if you are on a cpanel server for instance it would be /home/jaredritchey/public_html/realestate/ or if on a Plesk server maybe like /var/www/vhosts/jaredritchey.com/httpdocs/realestate/

The second issue people encounter with this version is that they don’t understand the idea behind “Instances” and because of this, I have renamed this in the newest version to “Featured Listing Instance Number” to articulate it a tad better. I came up with the idea of calling each featured instance an “instance” for lack of a better term at the time. Thus the way to understand it is like this; if you create several blog posts or pages about a particular community or subdivision and you decide that you would like to show maybe 5 or 10 or 15 featured listings in any of those posts for a particular subdivision then you need to create a WP Featured Listings Instance Number. That instance is simply a way to identify an instance of a WP Featured Listing.

I stuck with numbers for two basic reasons. I figured that by default, WordPress post URL’s end with a number for the post ID and if a person wanted to match the instance to a post ID it would help in managing the instances. The second reason was that all of the clients I built this for, each had wanted to display a “specific listing” or property in a “specific post” that they were seeking to market and I explained that the best way is to simply setup an instance and give it the MLS# for ease of management. So if you create an instance with the number of say 21 or maybe using an MLS number like 368748, then your template tag for your post would be { featured_21 } and it will render the listings based on the params you set for that instance.

Had I not been up to my neck in cleaning up really nasty code on several projects for The Brokers Edge clients I would have had more time to wrap up the documentation. I can promise you this, the newest version of this plug-in has features that make it sing and the upgrade is seamless and painless and I’ve included video documentation with great details. Its also important to note that we have a BRAND SPANKING NEW plug-in that does for WordPress what CMSRealty did for Joomla. It takes OpenRealty listings and puts everything into WordPress while maintaining nice clean SEF URL’s and puts the OpenRealty admin panel in a WordPress admin panel for ease of maintenance. I have a new domain already setup for it.

Now, rather than just post those things without proper preparation, I’ll first get the site reorganized which I’m right now in the middle of now. I let this site go for way to long unfortunately. Its like the shoe makers kids not having shoes. Just to busy with client work to take care of my own things. Broken links, nasty unvalidated code, poor layout issues in content, broken downloads and more are being redone. So, until then, thanks for visiting and feel free to contact me with any questions you may have.

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