Customizing your templates

If you’d like a bit more control over the display of your listings, and feel comfortable editing your theme files, then you’re in luck. The Great Real Estate plugin adds a number of template tags that you can use on your templates.

Enabling the sample templates

The sample templates in plugins/great-real-estate/copytotemplatedir/ are virtually identical to the default display.

To start, copy the following files to your theme’s directory:

• copytotemplatedir/listingpage.php
• copytotemplatedir/listings.php

and if you’d like to re-style the elements to match your current theme better, copy these files too:

• css/listings.css
• css/listings.tabs.css
• css/img/tabs.png

Then go to the Admin panels, under Real Estate, choose Settings. Uncheck the boxes next to “Listings Summary” and “Individual Listings Pages”, and if you’re modifying the CSS, uncheck the box next to “Add plugin css”.

Go to Manage Pages and edit your listings index and individual listings pages. You’ll need to change the Page Template (under Advanced) to “Listings Index” and “Listings Page” respectively.

You can then edit your style.css to incorporate (or reference) the styling in the plugin css files. And most importantly, you can edit the two templates, or even create additional versions.

Template tags

Need documentation on all the template tags and how to use the tags with the WordPress Loop? That’s up next.