Already scheduled are the first 12 videos we deem the most important which include the following;

• Post install configuration
• General Settings
• Google Maps
• Database settings
• Dealing with file permissions and uploads
• Lead management
• Template editing
• Introduction to the short code generator
• And more….

In addition, a nice little feature will allow you for instance to create an RSS link to “Our Listings” or “Our Featured Condos” lending a great deal of SEO and marketing power to your feed links.  This feature will be added to our short code generator in the Page / Post editor.

WordPress has released its beta version of WordPress 3.0 which now includes an option for making it a multi user installation.  The WPRealty team has built a different version of the plugin to work exclusively with the MU version and can provide all sub blogs their own unique listings features all of which are maintained from a single database.

What does this mean exactly? Well it means that if you have a real estate site and you plan on marketing for various cities or sub divisions, you could use WordPress MU in a way that better articulates your efforts. An example may be that you are a San Diego Realtor and you want to create a blog for the Pine Valley sub division you could have a url such as http://pinevalley.sandiego.com  It even gets better as you read on.

There are times that real estate Brokers may want to provide each of their agents their own blog in able to feature listings specific to that agent or area of expertise. You could have all the MLS listings loaded into a single install of the WPRealty MU version and then provide each agent with their own blog, their own listings and their own MLS search.  The URL could look like this for example; http://john.realestatedomain.com

More information will be published as we add new features.  We are only accepting hosted solutions for this particular version of WPRealty MU. The reason is in part due to the complex server requirements and need for some manual configuration.  If you or your agency is interested in hosting a WordPress MU site fully empowered with the MLS, please do not hesitate to contact us.

What is happening that makes email notifications ineffective?

People are hosting their WPRealty site on an endless inventory of different hosts and as such, some limitations are just not beneficial to a Realtor type website. What is happening is this; If you have a WPRealty website and someone saves a search for update notifications, servers are ending up black listed and emails are getting caught by anti spam tools before the notifications reach the in box.

Is this a problem exclusively with WPRealty? Absolutely not! The problem goes something like this.  Many web hosts limit the max emails per hour a site can send out and in some instances we are discovering that they can be set as low as 50 emails an hour. It gets worse. Many web hosts do not have properly configured PTR records among other optimal email settings. This can force emails sent out on bulk to get automatically filtered as spam in some instances.

What is the solution for auto update notifications of saved searches?

The solution from our perspective are four unique approaches which I’ll itemize below.

1. RSS Subscribe to Saved Searches based on your criteria.
   This is a new feature we are planning to follow our short code RSS generated feature that will allow members to save searches and then access those saved searches via RSS. How it works is simple. You save your search and you simply add the RSS feed to your MS Outlook or other RSS enabled email client and each time you press Send / Receive you get the updates.  You can also have your website clients add the feed to their iGoogle account.
2. Opt into update notifications twitter style
   Social media features are the next on the list of features we most want to complete and some of them will be specifically designed to provide update notifications to members of your WPRealty empowered website.
3. iPhone app.
   On of our favorite features we have planned is an iPhone application that will tie into your WPRealty site that you can distribute free of charge to your visiting clients. In fact, you could require the downloading of the application by your client in order to receive updates if you so desire.
4. iGoogle and Facebook is another avenue we are planning development for.
   With iGoogle and Facebook, your clients can opt into features within the website for a broader social networking integration.

These new features are planned for sometime in June or July and take a back stage at this point only for new client resource management features and short code enhancements now in development.

WPRealty has been downloaded 2,700 times in the past 4 months and may very likely exceed 3,000 by weeks end.  We know of and have reviewed some 80+ sites using the plugin and with active licenses on valid domains we get a number that comes in just below 350 blogs with the plugin installed.  Not to toot our own horn but this is substantial enough to suggest that the new round of updates and features should make this solution one of the best open source solutions for WordPress anywhere on the web.

After looking at the ordering stats and the many languages that represent the client base we decided to take the multi-lingual characteristics a bit more serious than in the past by adding in a feature for language support that really isn't like any product we have encountered.  From the start, I have always hated the idea of maintaining language files in order to get things done with multi lingual projects but we could not escape the requirement that language support needed to be effective, editable, expandable and easy to customize. Language files fit that bill but require too much knowledge from end users regarding PHP.  Errors will certainly surface if we started down the road by encouraging people to modify the language files of the plugin.  I'll explain a bit further.

Multi Lingual WordPress Real Estate Website

What we opted to do instead of using language files was make each of the language variables part of a language record in the database. Now with the new language table, end users can literally create a new record for a new language, edit those language variables used throughout the system and present those language changes based on user criteria.  Adding a template tag like { wpr_lang_2_url } would net the link that switches the language setting in your WPRealty portion of the blog. By allowing site owners to create their own language records, we can expand some of the functionality in ways that do not require a great deal of effort to have a truly multi lingual real estate website.

More on this as the demo becomes available.

WP Realty Has now been released as  – beta.v.1.0

http://wprealty.org/forums/showthread.php?p=48#post48

We recently decided to rework the our wprealty plugin to now include a fully forked version of Open-Realty that will allow for the most fully functioning and SEO friendly open source real estate solution for WordPress!

We are now offering a 50% off discount until October 1st. 2009 – For more information visit the following page Special Promotions.

Our wprealty plugin solution can easily be upgraded by us to include a fully funtioning MLS solution as seen in our portfolio. Anyone interested in this optional service should visit the following page MLS Solution For WordPress.