Reality / Real Estate website with Textpattern

tye · 2006-11-15 08:37:48

Hi – has anyone used textpattern as a Real Estate website before… ?

I’m thinking of it – with a few plugins of course – so just wanted to get your thoughts if you’ve done it before.

I haven’t thought it through – but my first thoughts are that txp is ideal.

Destry · 2006-11-16 20:55:13

Although you could certainly do something with Txp, you might give this a look, OpenRealty. I haven’t tried it, but I’ve been wanting to out of curiosity. If it’s relatively clean, customizable, and already goes some distance of framing a realty site, why reinvent the wheel?

hcgtv · 2006-11-16 23:10:21

I’ve used OpenRealty, it’s not bad for setting up a Realtor site and it’s not very big, code wise.

mrtunes · 2009-09-01 17:59:19

just wondering if anyone has done any real estate sites with TXP lately?

i know bloke was interested in using TXP for this purpose.

so far all I know is that ghz’s custom fields plugin is the best tool for this type of project, but overall i’d be weary about using this system for the average agent who might not be very tech savvy. there are plenty of 3rd party systems that seem to have a monopoly on this type of site(or duopoly? ha).

jm · 2009-09-03 02:22:21

mrtunes wrote:

just wondering if anyone has done any real estate sites with TXP lately?

I did about a year ago. It depends on what your client wants – do they want to post the home info and photos to MLS, or do they also want to post that same info to TXP? It also depends on what the local realtor association requires (assuming it’s the same in Canada as it is in the U.S.).

The site I did was pretty simple because the local association prohibited scraping and direct IDX feed access – you had to use an iframe (ick, I know). However, you can at least write a search form that looks better and use PHP to parse the input and to submit the vars to the MLS site/frame for regular property searches.

For the agent’s/agency’s properties (i.e., index of for sale properties), you could have a few custom fields for the street address and other home info, and then merge that into a query (using PHP’s urlencode() if needed). Then you could load the frame, so the MLS page seems like it’s on the agency’s site. Here’s some example code:

section: properties / article-list page

Our properties:
<txp:article limit="999">
    <txp:hide>...use PHP's urlencode for the cfs...</txp:hide>
    <a href="/search/?addr=<txp:custom_field name="address"/>..."><txp:title/></a>
</iframe>
</txp:article>

section: search / iframe/MLS handler

<txp:variable name="mls_uri" value="http://example.com/search/"/>
<txp:php>
// parse $_GET request
// ...
// build iframe HTML
</txp:php>

Not sure if that helps, but let me know if you need some clarification.

mrtunes · 2009-09-03 02:50:18

jm wrote:

I did about a year ago. It depends on what your client wants – do they want to post the home info and photos to MLS, or do they also want to post that same info to TXP? It also depends on what the local realtor association requires (assuming it’s the same in Canada as it is in the U.S.).

thank you for all that info, i’ll have to take a closer look later on. i’m actually not quite certain what one of my clients wants to do. i’m not really afraid of either option though. MLS integration is very easy for them, but horribly ugly. custom listings will look better and might generate additional income if they don’t want to administer it. i’m still just in early phases of research and all that, so thanks for your code example.

kevinpotts · 2009-09-12 13:03:56

mrtunes wrote:

just wondering if anyone has done any real estate sites with TXP lately?

I am building one right now, but I don’t think it’s like most real estate sites. My client specializes in large-acreage properties like commercial lots and farms in the midwest, so house features and photos are less important. But it has been fun wrangling data, especially this bit

Textpattern CMS

Textpattern CMS support forum

#1 2006-11-15 08:37:48