WordPress Real Estate Plugin - WordPress Real Estate Themes - WP REALTY » WPREALTY

WP Realty Video Guides

Jared — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 04:28:37 +0000

WPRealty has contracted a professional video guide development to be published in our ticket documentation center for registered members. The new videos may include instructional guides among other tools and resources to assist in the best possible use of the plug-in in your WordPress blog.

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….

WPRealty New RSS Features

Jared — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 04:24:13 +0000

WPRealty now features RSS short code so site administrators can publish RSS links to specific listing classifications. In summary without going into great detail, what this means is that if you feature listings for a particular subdivision, city, community, office, agent or whatever criteria, you can publish an RSS feed link that will return only those results for your clients and visitors to subscribe to.

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.

WPRealty for WPMU

Jared — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 04:19:17 +0000

WPRealty for WordPress Multi-User is now in stable release as a hosted solution.

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.

WPRealty and Social Media

admin — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 14:17:07 +0000

Well after looking long and hard at several “Anti-Spam” issues we have discovered with the saved search notifications feature in WPRealty, we are considering a set of new feature that will allow for custom RSS based links and social media updates to solve this. What happens is this will make WPRealty a bit more modern in terms of tracking saved searches and other types of notifications.

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.

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.
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.
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.
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 3.0 Multi Lingual

Jared — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 14:29:28 +0000

I wanted to come in this morning and make a quick post about a feature we are wrapping up in WPRealty 3.0 for those following the project. For those who do not know, WPRealty 3.0 is the next level in the series of WPRealty builds that will be better suited for IDX and RETS type real estate sites. From the start of the project almost three years ago, it has been our goal to create an open source GNU/GPL plugin for WordPress that would allow Realtors to escape the proprietary nonsense and limitations imposed upon them by commercial providers.

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.

What is WP Realty?

Jared — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 16:58:36 +0000

What exactly is WP Realty?

WP Realty is quite literally an integrated listings manager script designed to work inside of WordPress for the management of real estate listings. Although our 3.0 version has been 100% re-written from the ground up to feature a new data base structure; the decision to integrate our forked version of Open-Realty® served a few purposes in order to facilitate the transition. Almost daily, people will still ask us why we went with the forked version of a listings manager to achieve what we were after in version 2.0. Here is a bit of history to explain this.

Back in 2008 we had taken the static build version of Open-Realty® and forked it to suite our needs for the projects we developed with Open-Realty®. We have our own formula for site building and therefore required a few enhancements and modifications to the product in order to accommodate our needs. After building the fork however, we opted to NOT publish it since maintenance and support would become a lofty task given the situation at that time.

Shortly after we started using our forked version of Open-Realty®, problems would frequently surface where updates were concerned. The original idea was to remove the ADODB abstraction layer for the much faster PDO method. As clients attempted to update their websites with successive versions of Open-Realty® they would overwrite our version resulting in a broken site and in many cases a site that would not function with automated MLS updates. This was the first issue we identified and knew we needed to consider other methods of using the forked variant.

Naturally as time went on WordPress not only grew in popularity, it exploded as the number one tool used by Real Estate professionals seeking to increase their presence on the internet. As early as 2007 we began building WordPress sites for Realtors and as I will demonstrate below you can examine the succession of the WP Realty plugin as it evolved over the past 3 years. But first, it was important to keep in mind a that since the market really dictates what gets developed, Realtors were migrating away from paid solution providers faster than we could keep up and they expected to take back control. We formulated the concept of WP Realty to integrate rather than bridge applications.

WP Realty 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, History Timeline.

WP Realty 2.0 was to be the transition application between the former WP Realty 1.0 bridge and the fully realized custom WP Realty 3.0 Plugin. A brief look at the versions will tell a better story of our efforts and what you can expect in the version updates as we publish them.

What Is WP Realty 1.0

WP Realty 1.0 was essentially a way to integrate listings from Open-Realty® into a WordPress blog by using a plugin. A truly unique and 100% proprietary solution, the plugin was used quite successfully in dozens and dozens of sites.

In essence, the plugin would bring in listings into a WordPress blog for better SEO control and benefit from the listings to take advantage of the native WordPress features that have proven successful time and time again. Although we had still employed other methods of using both WordPress and Open-Realty® together with a technique of CURL and php Includes to clone the features, the subsequent SEO results were spotty at best. We needed something a bit more reliable if we really wanted to bridge the two applications for better SEO control. WP Realty 1.0 as I stated above became the tool that worked for dozens and dozens of real estate websites quite effectively.

WP Realty 1.0 was first published in 2007 and officially on WordPress in December of that year. We used WP Realty 1.0 throughout 2008 and part of 2009. WP Realty 1.0 was updated recently and is still maintained. Although WP Realty 1.0 was truly unique and proprietary it was not without its challenges as competitors took every opportunity to not only copy the plugin for use in their own solutions but shoot it down as a viable product in part because of their dislike for Open-Realty®.

Open-Realty® over the course of a year earned a horrific reputation of being one of the most hostile and unfriendly forums on the internet. Challenging the wisdom of professionals as a routine and often editing, punishing and even banning members for mere mention of integration with WordPress or employing tools such as VieleRETS. The Open-Realty® community dwindled substantially in activity which so offended people they would not use WP Realty as a result.

What is WP Realty 2.0

WP Realty 2.0 came about after we received countless requests and troubleshooting tickets from the plugin users that said the latest version of Open Realty® included a blog of their own and presented unique changes that would actually conflict with WordPress. Although we fixed the bugs and updated WP Realty 1.0, we opted to consider a new approach. It was time to go back to WP Realty 1.0 and rather than ask someone to install Open-Realty® separately, we would simply apply our forked version to the plugin folder as to avoid version conflicts. Naturally this was no easy task. After thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours in development, design and testing, we released the very first version of WP Realty 2.0 in October 2009. Since the initial release of WP Realty 2.0 we have since published 13 updates of which 4 are official version updates to correct bugs and add in new features.

One might consider WP Realty 2.0 to be in a similar position as Joomla was with its relationship to Mambo. Joomla 1.0 was forked from Mambo after many reasons which lead to a conflict in the direction the product was going. Joomla’s first version was quite literally Mambo rebranded as was our first fork of Open-Realty®. Although many dozens of products people use today are forks of the originals, the license method remains intact. The reason for the licensing of a GNU/GPL product is to provide succession of the work which can be published freely as unique works if desired. With Open-Realty® their license actually began as GNU/GPL and migrated to a proprietary license with similar characteristics. Most notably, Open-Realty® now “encrypts” all of their code and requires that the sites must retain the “powered-by” tag in the footer of everywhere the code is displayed or pay to have it removed by buying a license.

From the licensing stand point we opted to always maintain an unencrypted source code but always require a valid license to have access to downloads, updates, or support forums.

What is WP Realty 3.0

WP Realty 3.0 was planned for development back in 2008 and began casual part time development in October 2010. Although developed from the ground up as a completely proprietary product, nearly all of the existing features available in WP Realty 2.0 are maintained to the next version. WP Realty 3.0 has been back in full development after the first of the year and is scheduled for release by mid 2011.

WP Realty 3.0 solves several issues we have experienced over the years with enhancements in key areas of concern. First, we are building WP Realty 3.0 to be better positioned for use as a replacement for proprietary solution providers. Rather than try and assault and directly compete with the proprietary solution providers, we are opting instead to structure the licensing that would allow solution providers to use the solution unbranded, unrestricted for the most part, and to do so in an affordable way. We are building WP Realty 3.0 to work as an enhancement to those themes by keeping the listings manager dependent on the theme for its overall structure. Naturally some may wonder why and the simple answer is simplicity of integration. Too many plugins require too many modifications to function properly and the more we shift the styling, structure and typography to the theme developer the more likely the new WP Realty will be embraced.

Another key factor in the development of the WP Realty 3.0 version is our total migration away from the forked version of Open-Realty® as the new techniques we use for this 3.0 listings manager is entirely unique. Enhancements will include a much better database structure, better support for IDX and RETS import, CSV import is a native feature and a lofty inventory of key features like Google maps, xml export and sales lead management are central to the development.

NOTE* As of March 20011 – We have made a several changes to the direction in which we are taking and developing 3.0. We will be making an announcement letting everyone one know more information within the next couple of months when we are ready to release the first beta version.

wp-realty-update

admin — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 15:13:36 +0000

WP Realty – Updated: Oct – 31st 1:am

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

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

…

WPREALTY

admin — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 15:08:47 +0000

Introducing the worlds best WordPress Real Estate Plugin called “wprealty”.

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.