Question: when is a blog not a blog ?
Answer: When you use wordpress to make a real estate site!
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3I recently took on a client who showed me his custom built php cms and wanted me to change it. I fell overwhelmed by the backend, may i say a little scared !. However I took the job on anyhow I’ve always been a firm believer in the benefits of open source CMS like joomla and WordPress. It seems to me that custom CMS always fail clients in there lack of flexibility.
So I embarked on a journey into WordPress and real estate , we have just launched the site and I m more than pleased with the results. Its been a steep learning curve – I’ve used a lot of JQuery to get the functionality Needed for the site.
So We looked at and evaluated real estate plugins!
Form an Aussie perspective many of the plugins are a little useless as they tend to focus on Amercan real estate site integration. We checked out
- Great Real Estate
I really would not advise using this plugin its no longer supported. - Simple Real Estate
I wasn’t happy with this plugin either because it lacked the functionality I needed in terms of search parameters – I needed to be able to add features to properties and have them searchable. - WP- property
I finally settled on this plugin though it does have Some downsides its upsides seemed to out weigh the bad.
Wp Property
Well this is the plugin I finally settled on, its seemingly robust, support seems ok, though they really wont help you make the plugin jump through hoops. On the upside it has great features like:
- Ability to make custom maps (though this is a bough add-on i felt it was well worth the $25!)
- Customisable search parameters (If you want to search your listings for say frontage its not hard to do)
- Customisable search widget (you’ll see I managed to fully trick mine out with a slider!)
- Control over display of listings and property information
On the down side… The plugin really dose not play well with others.. Word of warning unless you plan to use there theme id stick to making a child of twenty eleven they only guarantee it will work with that theme and some of the basic navigation elements will die /disappear if you use an incompatible theme..(I had to learn this the hard way ). However having said that it is fair enough they cant suport every conceivable theme -that would be pretty impossible . At the end of the day its a great little plugin that provides a huge amount of control over listing properties and I recommend it .
