Finally Back

I’ve been out of the loop dealing with a few projects but now I’m finally back.

I took a break from freelance for many reasons and one of the motivating factors of me returning to freelance is the WPRealty update to 3.0. Now that WPRealty 3.0 is nearly ready for public release I’ll be focusing on getting the balance of our RETS and IDX scripting updated and current. WPRealty totally kicks the requirement for integration of Open Realty out the door as all code is 100% proprietary now.

Anyway please feel free to visit the project on wprealty.org

Dwellicious Has Serious Potential

Its only been a few weeks since I started examining the potential benefits by using Dwellicious on websites and in that short period of time we have already built two free plugins, one of which is for OpenRealty and the other for WordPress.  Although some are still a little confused as to why we would need to provide such tools, it really isn’t too awful complex to provide details as to why we think its so important.

With Dwellicious, I sincerely believe that their service (if not abused by black hat types) could be a PR7 or PR8 site overnight. That being said, for people who legitimately subscribe then submit an inventory of favorites to the service, can ultimately use the service within their guidelines to legitimately build backlinks to your most desired featured listings.  Naturally this isn’t to say that all users should be Realtors or those at least in the marketing of real estate, but one must not over look the potential here.

Although there are many types of products and services providers available that can extend similar functionality to their sites, none of them can extend the options dwellicious does in a cost effective way.  What features and functionality you might ask? Well, to begin with, dwellicious can give any home seeker a way to bookmark inventory favorite property listings in a social networking type format (environment)  for listings  all over the web. Providing the website hosting the listings incorporated the dwellicious feature.  So regardless of  states or boundaries that normal bookmarking methods would pose in a general website solution, dwellicious opens the door to bridge similarly constrained solutions by jumping on this massive trend in social networking by making the first ever truly real estate related resource.

In addition to the current examples I’ll be actively publishing on my blog, you should drop in and follow the development team blog located at http://blog.wr-studios.com/ as we continue to push our energies into building more user friendly affordable open source real estate solutions, it would be a serious advantage for any real estate website owner to consider dwellicious as a key fundamental feature for a successful modern site.  To follow my latest post on the Top 10 reason why dwellicious can provide ideal solutions for your real estate website by visiting http://www.jaredritchey.com/top10-dwellicious-possibilities/

WordPress and Zillow

A brief note about our new plugin for WordPress.  We released the first version of the Zillow Demographics API plugin for WordPress today.  The new plugin provides bloggers with a method for adding Zillow Demographic Charts to posts and pages. Completely template driven, this new plugin can be used to provide not just content relative images and features but assist the blogger in providing interesting content.

You can read more about it on http://www.ultimateidx.com

WordPress Cascading Menu

We released the cascading menu update yesterday and once its received its final edits I’ll submit it to the WordPress plugin directory.

Version 1.0.3 is actually the one I’m most eager to see production ready as we are adding in a jQuery feature that allows you to change the sort order of menu items by simply dragging the field to the position you desire. I’ll also add in a new feature where it can be used in WordPress MU sites allowing an administrator to deactivate the “DELETE” feature for menus. Several people have reported that when using our product with WordPress MU that some users delete their menu’s causing errors in the rendered template.

The WordPress Menu Creator will also be updated to take advantage of WordPress 2.7 and the automatic update feature now in beta. Chances are we will release the OpenRealty Guides and WordPress Guides at the same time since they share similar core code features for structure and the updates underway will be applied across each of those FREE products.

You can download it here http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-menu-creator/

Also thanks and cudos to my web friend Bryan at CMS Report

First Post

Yet another method for getting my rant on the internet I registered for this very blog on WordPress.com

I’ll change this post naturally when I get some real content to add but for now I’m just organizing and configuring.

~ Jared