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.

Effective pricing as of March 1st
30 dollar license will go to 39.95
80 dollar license will go to 89.95
150 dev-license will go to 199.95

We will be rolling out our newest plugin within the next 3 to 6 days that will include some extra nice items for simple lead management, advanced contact manager and a new easy to use custom form maker that includes short code tags so that you can embed and style the forms anyway you like.

Once the above is completed and released we will begin working on a new custom interface for creating all of your short codes…it simply ties in all of the data fields into a simple interface that allows you to actually see the data fields from your current mls/idx  – just pick the fields you want and it will build the shortcode right there in the window with the option to insert the code straight into the wysiwyg editor.

All of this will be tested and completed within the next 10 days and once we are sure that we have sufficiently tested everything we will be making the new release available for download in your client area.

We have a few more surprises coming this week but I don't want to promise anything that may be still be delayed due to technical snags – but we will be hinting more about it later this week. =)

Best Regards,
WP Realty Team.

What does the new short code look like? Here is the first release inventory of what we currently have.

For Embedding FEATURED listings use the following short-code samples and replace the count=”#” to display the number of listings – Please note that these featured_listing_vertical.html and featured_listing_horizontal.html templates are located in our templates editor
[wp-realty-listings-featured-vertical count="4"]
[wp-realty-listings-featured-horizontal count="4"]

These are simple examples of how to use short-code to build various strings that will display listings right into your content.

NOTE* Template used with samples below is called embed-template.html and is located in our templates editor.

NOTE* These are only examples. The data fields shown “Subdivision” or “Neighborhood” will have to match the data field (Names) in YOUR site.

“Subdivision – (Your Subdivision Name) (5) Random ordered by price DESC ”
[wp-realty-listings fields='Subdivision' values="replace with subdivision name" orderby="price" orderdir="DESC" count="5"]

“City – (Your City Name) (5) Random ordered by price DESC ”
[wp-realty-listings fields='City' values="replace with city name" orderby="price" orderdir="DESC" count="5"]

“City – (Your City Name) (5) Ordered by price DESC”
[wp-realty-listings fields='City' values="replace with city name" orderby="price" orderdir="DESC" count="5" sort_type="global"]

“5 Most expensive listings in “
[wp-realty-listings orderby="price" orderdir="DESC" count="5" sort_type="global"]

“City – (Your City Name), Agent ID – 63 (5) Ordered by price DESC [multple criteria example]”
[wp-realty-listings-remote fields='City,Agent_ID' values="replace with city name,63" orderby="price" orderdir="DESC" count="5" sort_type="global"]

We will be adding more samples soon but for now enjoy the POWER of true SEO embedded listings by using our short code system.

What is ORPress?

Put in simple terms it is WPRealty 1.0 renamed befitting of its purpose. ORPress is essentially a 100% FREE GNU/GPL product that will bridge the standard install of OpenRealty and integrate it into WordPress.  You might ask why not leave the name WPRealty 1.0? Well its a complex set of events that resulted in a slight our error in judgment.  Although we had hoped to just toss WPRealty 1.0 aside for much better version in 2.0, we realized that we were a tad to presumptuous in thinking there would be no market for people wanting to take the latest OpenRealty and making it work with WordPress.  Naturally this idea was based on some indicators beginning with the witnessing of OpenRealty forum members being banned or having their posts edited for the mere mention of “integrating wordpress with openrealty” and figured that is a path no longer traveled.

Recently however there has been a surge in interest in bridging the applications with the latest version of both. What we realized is that now that WordPress can be mentioned in the OpenRealty forums without punitive results we could take our plugin, bring it up to date with our new NON IFRAMED method of integration.

So, ORPress is reworked WPRealty 1.0 with new updates and improved code.  You can now take and bridge both applications effectively while taking advantage of support from each application independently.

I’d like to make mention that we are the very first group of developers and designers to ever integrate WordPress and OpenRealty together in a way that had any utility value. We were second in the market to integrate Joomla and OpenRealty and later became the only team to date that tied in Joomla with a home grown version of the listings manager.

As you may or may not know, ARMLS charges its vendors about $X amount per month to be able to provide IDX to Realtors and in fact many popular and commercial solution providers are authorized vendors of the ARMLS MLS.  WPRealty IS NOT an authorized vendor and here is why.  Our resources are being fully directed toward the development of WPRealty 3.0 and we do not have the necessary client base in the ARMLS market to justify the cost.

You may ask; Why are there sites out there in the ARMLS market using WPRealty, how is this done? I’ll answer this by giving a case in point and then disclose our position.

How to get ARMLS MLS Listings in WordPress

WPRealty and the WPRealty team builds developer solutions with our primary product WPRealty 2.0, our form manager, our plugins and addons all of which currently fit the requirements of Realtors using WordPress as their sites CMS engine. We built WPRealty initially for use in projects we personally developed for Realtors and Agents then later pushed it forward as a product other developers can use as a software product.  The initial target audience was webmasters, designers, site developers and MLS professionals. WPRealty has become a bit simpler to use and we have more and more actual end users purchasing the plugin in hopes of securing a great price for the much anticipated WPRealty 3.0.  Regardless of who it is that purchases WPRealty, one thing is always true. Each person using it in ARMLS (and other markets) is required to have their own MLS authorized access to the MLS data.  WPRealty is simply the software tool that saves Realtors thousands of dollars in development by making it compatible with most MLS data loaders on the market.  That being said I’ll cover a case in point with an ARMLS authorized Realtor.

ARMLS Website Example Case

A Realtor who has been authorized by ARMLS to have data feed access for their website purchases WPRealty for use in their WordPress site.  This same Realtor is free to contract any developer to use existing MLS integration tools to work with WPRealty in order to populate the site with listings, or, they contract us to do the integration for them.  If we are contracted we always extend the opportunity for them to host with us (our primary business is hosting and Realtor site development) since we build so many sites we know what it takes for real estate website hosting.  We then use the Realtors authorized credentials to build the data loader for their website. The Realtor then has his/her own custom solution working in WordPress for real estate listings.

We do not take that code and build turnkey ARMLS sites because we are not a vendor. We do build the software that makes this possible for the Realtor to use.

What does ARMLS provide the authorized Realtor?

Once approved you should be provided something to the effect of the following credentials. Its important to note that you must agree to their terms and conditions as is the case with all MLS providers.

1. HOST URL: http://rets.flexmls.com???????????
2. USER NAME: abc.cde.hij
3. PASSWORD: something-that-matters
4. PDF Documentation on requirements such as disclosure, configuration and so on.

I Want ARMLS in my WordPress site!

Once you purchase WPRealty and setup your site you can hire us to write the custom scripts for you for inclusion or you can hire a programmer or simply use available tools for MLS integration such as vieleRETS, RetsConnector, phRets, TransparentRets (commercial and very expensive).

The process for integrating RETS into a WPRealty database will vary depending on market and fields available. The process for us is to map fields (the bulk of the hard part) then write the SQL inclusion process.

The best thing to do is to contact us for more details to avoid any possible confusion.

What we have started yesterday and hope to finish this weekend is the KB Articles, documentation and an assortment of quick start videos available to all registered members.  You can find the KB Articles as we publish them by visiting the Client Area of the site. Click Here!

Now the time has come to announce to the public that we have started the new website design along with several new how-to videos – and we hope to have the new site up by the 17th – (as long as the videos are completed by then).

Other News:
The new 2.0.5 version has had a few more new tweaks added and is going to be released by this next Friday the 15th.

I cant wait for all of the feed back from everyone – check back  around the middle of the week for updates =)

WordPress Real Estate Plugins

Best Regards,
Chad

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.

WPRealty is quite literally an integrated listings manager script based on a forked version of OpenRealty modified in such a way as to provide WordPress bloggers a means of adding real estate listings to his/her site while extending the feature of adding custom search, display and marketing of properties. Although version 3.0 will be 100% proprietary, the decision to integrate our forked version of OpenRealty 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 OpenRealty and forked it to suite our needs for the projects we developed with OpenRealty.  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 potential confusion between our forked variant and the actual OpenRealty script.  Having consulted with Ryan Bonham about my intentions several years ago in a group chat session, he stressed that forking OpenRealty would be fine so long as the name OpenRealty was not used.  His concern naturally was that they would not attempt to support it and would prefer we do not use their product name which could result in some confusion. 

Shortly after we started using our forked version of OpenRealty, 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 OpenRealty 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 WPRealty plugin as it evolved over the past two and a half 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 WPRealty to integrate rather than bridge applications.

WPRealty 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, what is the differences and why does it matter?

WPRealty 2.0 was to be the transition application between the former WPRealty 1.0 bridge and the fully realized custom WPRealty 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 WPRealty 1.0

WPRealty 1.0 was essentially a way to integrate listings from OpenRealty 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 OpenRealty 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. WPRealty 1.0 as I stated above became the tool that worked for dozens and dozens of real estate websites quite effectively.

WPRealty 1.0 was first published in 2007 and officially on WordPress in December of that year. We used WPRealty 1.0 throughout 2008 and part of 2009. WPRealty 1.0 was updated recently and is still maintained. Although WPRealty 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 OpenRealty.

OpenRealty 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 OpenRealty community dwindled substantially in activity which so offended people they would not use WPRealty as a result.

What is WPRealty 2.0

WPRealty 2.0 came about after we received countless requests and trouble shooting tickets from the plugin users that said the latest version of OpenRealty included a blog of their own and presented unique changes that would actually conflict with WordPress. Although we fixed the bugs and updated WPRealty 1.0, we opted to consider a new approach. It was time to go back to WPRealty 1.0 and rather than ask someone to install OpenRealty for integration, 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 buggy version of WPRealty 2.0 in October 2009. Since the initial release of WPRealty 2.0 we have since published 6 updates of which 4 are official version updates to correct bugs and add in new features.

One might consider WPRealty 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 OpenRealty.  Although many dozens of products people use today are forks of the originals, the license method remains in tact.  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 OpenRealty their license actually began as GNU/GPL and migrated to a proprietary license with similar characteristics.  Most notably, OpenRealty requires that any product, commercial or otherwise, must retain the copyright tag in the source, must include an unencrypted version of the modified code and must be available freely without expense. 

From the licensing stand point we opted to maintain a separate folder or archive for those wanting to download the free code in keeping with the OpenRealty license and we went a step further by providing a full, unedited copy of the original license within the plugin folder.

WPRealty 2.0 Was essentially developed to take away the need to install OpenRealty and allowed us to add in all the dozens upon dozens of modifications and enhancements we wanted without running the risk future updates of OpenRealty would render our efforts moot.  Although WPRealty is fully unique in terms of its being a plugin, it has caused a bit of confusion regarding the integration of the forked version of OpenRealty and the modification of the details in each PHP file.  I'll summarize the changes like this; We modified each php file to include new details because Ryan Bonham DOES NOT and WILL NOT support the product.  In keeping with his request years past, we not only renamed it accordingly but also removed support links that pointed back to OpenRealty.  Although WPRealty 2.0 is still a fully unique product as a plugin, we do include our forked version of OpenRealty to simply remove the need for a separate install.

We have found people on the internet suggesting that this was done in an attempt to debunk OpenRealty and the simple fact is, its done to make things easier instead of trying to maintain cohesion between separate applications.

What is WPRealty 3.0

WPRealty 3.0 was planned for development back in 2008 and began casual part time development in October of this year. Although developed from the ground up as a completely proprietary product, nearly all of the existing features available in WPRealty 2.0 are maintained to the next version.  WPRealty 3.0 will be back in full development after the first of the year and will feature a tool for importing both WPRealty 2.0 and OpenRealty data for easy migration to the new solution. 

WPRealty 3.0 solves several issues we have experienced over the years with enhancements in key areas of concern. First, we are building WPRealty 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.  The same is true of our relationship with theme developers like Bryan Gardner and others who specialize in Real Estate Theme development.  We are building WPRealty 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 WPRealty will be embraced.

Another key factor in the development of the WPRealty 3.0 version is our total migration away from the forked version of OpenRealty as the technique we use for the listings manager is entirely unique. This allows us to publish WPRealty 3.0 as a fully GNU/GPL product as originally desired with WPRealty 1.0.  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.

When WPRealty 3.0 is published it will be GNU/GPL licensed and will have paid options that will include branded, non branded, non branded unlimited use.  By doing so we can keep a free version out there as we do with all of our other plugins in exchange for link bait.  Most themes and plugins in fact are published with links back to the developer site and we would intend on keeping this a feature in our free version.  A person could buy a support license like they do now with WPRealty 2.0 for an unbranded version and then we would offer an unlimited unbranded version for people who build and or provide Real Estate WordPress websites to their clients.

We thought long and hard about the best way to fund the development and maintenance of the plugin without violating the GNU/GPL terms and we feel that making it "Support Ware" is the best solution. Support takes time, it takes money and it takes persistence and many open source applications die as a result. Our solution will provide it freely for those confident with plugin usage and still offer a supported version used to fund development and updates as we now do.

This version is only available to current License Holders – Just log in to your client area and you will find the new 2.0.4 version is there for download.

We have decided that we will no longer be releasing our NEWEST versions as a FREE Trial Version since our code is completely unencrypted and we have already found our plugin “nulled” out there.

For now we will leave the Old FREE Trial 2.0.1 version up just for people to use as an installation test but we will soon be ending it all together once we have the New Demo Sites up for people to login and play with later this week.

**IMPORTANT**
This version requires a separate mysql-update script for those that are going to want to just update from the 2.0.1 trial version (you should just completely remove the old version). If you havent gotten that far along then simply delete the old version and install this new one as a fresh install.
**Note – This updater.php script will only be for the site config and should not affect any other tables therefore it should not require any kind of back up of your existing db but we always recommend doing so prior to running this update script.
** If you need assistance or have questions on this then please open a trouble ticket and I will be glad to answer your questions.

Newest Features recently added to the core as of v2.0.3:
1). Added our custom embedded Google maps with “street view” and “walk-score” to the default templates and to the New “Site-Config” Map Tab.
2). Added script to automatically add the new required js and css to the header of the WP Realty pages created in wordpress.

Bug Fixes:
1). Fixed all pop ups for email to friend, calculator etc.
2). Fixed the Featured Listings RSS bugs
3). Lots of other minor css issues etc also fixed.

We think we have fixed the following ghost bugs but the verdict is still out.
1). The mystery “Please Log In” user pass.
2). Conflicts with WordPress RSS.

Best Regards,
Chad