This is going to be a “Powerful” Real Estate CMS Platform to build your real estate sites with!

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.

Just log in to your client area and you will find the new 2.0.9 RC-1 version is there for download.

**IMPORTANT**
*NOTE* – VERY IMPORTANT -
Our plugin updates will overwrite all core files/items inside the root of the plugin except for the following folder/directories:

1. /wp-realty/images/
2. /wp-realty/files/
3. /wp-realty/templates/
4. /wp-realty/formkit/

**Note – We always recommend doing complete backup prior to running new plugin install.
** If you need assistance or have questions on this then please open a trouble ticket and I will be glad to answer your questions.

== Important -2.0.9 CORE- Updates This Release ==
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What’s New In 2.0.9 -

This version is basically just an upgrade and includes some much needed improvements to the new form builder to allow for more customization that can now include individual html & css for each form.

1.    Unlimited Custom forms with custom html/css template options.
2.    New optional Thank You Message.
3.    New optional on [submit] redirect url.
4.    Custom html forms are stored in your site /wprealty/template/your-template/forms/

We have also tried to fix the install.php to prevent random re-writes to the mysql so we made this version automatically remove the file when activating the plugin – the only negative for this is going to be if the plugin does not install properly the first time then the install.php will need to need to be manually re-uploaded to try to retry the install.

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We are now working on new for 2.1.0
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1. We are going to make some more improvements to our short code builder to now include a new optional rss link per short code – great for even more seo =)
2. Also coming in the the next release is going to be many new improvements for our lead router / manager.

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.

We belive that we've put together some really great new features that will make our real estate plugin even more powerful by using some of the benefits of new features in 3.0 – one of the new features will be that all subdomains can now use the option to pull the listings tables in from the main site allowing for real estate listings to be embedded into unlimited sub domains without having to install multiple copies of the same mls solution. This will save a ton of time AND money!

Look for this to be coming out in our 2.0.9 release by the end of the month.

WordPress Real Estate Plugin
WordPress Real Estate Themes

Those of you that are fine with 2.0.6 may want to wait for a more mature 2.0.8 which will have some new tweaks to 2.0.7.

2.0.8 is scheduled for release by no later than the middle of April and will mainly consist of some tweaks and some clean ups to our current code.

WordPress Real Estate Plugin
WordPress Real Estate Themes

WP Realty 2.0.7-RC version – RC = Release Candidate

We have added a New “Form Creator” with “Lead Manager”.
These (2) items are “Brand New” and we’re already “rapidly” making changes to this for the next 2.0.8 and we are just going to make some basic How-To written instructions until we get things developed a little more. Once we get the modifications done I will put together a video explaining this area in better detail.

Next New item is our “Short Code Builder”.
This is simply the coolest thing yet – you can now make your own custom templates and create your own custom short code – and – it will automatically insert the code straight into your page or post. With this new feature the embedding possibilities are only limited to what data you have within the MLS.

Next New item:
We added New Short Code Templates Editor in our Templates Editor section.

Next New item:
We added the Longitude / Latitude options to our Google maps.

Last of all – Bug Fixes.
There were a few bugs left from the last version that have been fixed in this release:
1). Next-Prev is now fixed.
2). Edit Listing “> orphans are gone now.
3) Several CSS fixes within the admin areas….sure I’m forgetting to include something here but everything that was on our list from the previous 2.0.6 was fixed =)

=== Installation ===
How to upgrade to 2.0.7

Whenever we make some “major upgrades” like this one there will be some additional steps required:
This upgrade will require the following steps:
1.    Make a complete backup of your site AND mysql database – don’t say that we didn’t tell you this in advance!
2.    Now that you have made your backups – Now “Deactivate” the WP Realty Plugin.
3.    Next ftp into your plugins directory and go to your plugins/wp-realty/include/ and delete the “common.php” file.
4.    Next – Go back to the wordpress plugins directory/folder and either drag and drop or copy and paste our new wp-realty folder into the plugins directory and overwrite the files when prompted.
5.    Next – ftp back into your plugins/wp-realty/include/ and make sure that both the ”includes” directory and the “common-dist.php” file are both writeable with either 755 or 777 depending on your servers chmod settings. (most of the time nothing needs to be changed)
6.    Last – reactivate the plugin and it should now say 2.0.7

If you have a white screen then that means that you have a permissions error with the /include/ and or the common-dist.php file.

Best Regards,
Chad

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We are now working on new for 2.0.8 and – 2.0.9
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List of the next features coming:
• We have several tweaks to our 2.0.7 Forms and Leads section coming in the next 2.0.8.
• We are going to have this working with MU 3.0 Beta within 2 weeks.
• Plus we are going to start on our NEW Google Map Search immediately after the MU project.

Still working on………….
Working on a IDX Importer.
Working on our 3.0 as well.

WordPress Real Estate Themes
WordPress Real Estate Plugin

These new WordPress Real Estate Themes are going to be released around the 17th and they will also include our basic quick search, theme options menu and of course all of our WP Realty templates that will include the matching design size and colors specifically made for each real estate theme.