Quick Start Guide
Follow these steps to get your Great Real Estate plugin set up quickly, and add your first listing.
Download
You can download the current version (1.0) from the WordPress.org Plugin Directory.
Direct link: http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/great-real-estate.zip
Install into your WordPress system
Unzip the file and copy the folder great-real-estate and its contents into your /wp-content/plugins/ directory.
Configuration
Activate the plugin through the Admin “Plugins” menu as usual. You can also activate the “Featured Listings” widget here, if you wish to use the widget on your sidebar.
You should see a new top-level Admin menu, Real Estate. Click the tab.
The left most tab, Real Estate, shows a short summary of your content. On the right side of the screen, the support column contains useful links. But most important for setting up, the Plugin Status panel displays the status of the various third party plugins you might want to use.
But don’t worry, you can come back to this later… for now let’s get your Settings… click the Settings tab.
Basic Settings
Choose a Page on your server to be the main Listings page. This is where you’ll display information about your current listings. It should not be your main homepage or your blog page. If you don’t have such a page, just quickly create one… call it “My Listings” and you can leave the content blank. Make it a top-level page (i.e., No parent page).
Now check the boxes next to “Listings Summary” and “Individual Listings Pages”. This will tell WordPress to automatically generate the extra content for your listings. You can turn this off later, if you decide to use the supplied sample theme templates and template tags.
If you have a Google API key, paste it in the box. Without it, you’ll have no map displays.
You can leave everything else for now… we’re ready to get your listings published.
Creating Listing Content
Now that you’ve chosen a main Listings page, you’ll create one sub-page here for each of your listings. How? Create a new Page (note: not a post, a page!). Give it a descriptive name - either the property address, or something like “Waterfront pool home with private dock”.
In the Content area, paste your nicely written description of this property. Insert a More tag just after the introductory paragraph(s). (I’m assuming that since you got this far, you have a bit more to say than “great home, a must see”. Right?) If you need to create subheadings for the paragraphs, go ahead.
Now, to make your new Page a listings page and enable the additional data fields, go down under the “Advanced Options” section and open the “Page Parent” sub-panel. Choose your main Listings Page as this page’s parent. Save the page! You should now see a whole bunch of extra fields just below the content area.
Any Page you set as a sub-page to your main Listings page will be treated as a real estate listing.
The listings fields should be self-explanatory, if you’re in the real estate business. Fill in the information you have for the property. Be sure to select a Status, and a list Price and Date.
Adding Enhancements
These optional enhancements will add tabs to your listings page to display the information. Depending on the plugin, you’ll likely need to use that plugin’s mechanisms to upload and manage your additional photos and videos.
If you have NextGen Gallery installed, you can choose a Gallery (this is highly recommended, since the first photo of the gallery will be used as a thumbnail).
If you have wordTube, you can choose a video.
If you have FPP-Pano, you can choose one or more panoramas.
If you have WP-Downloadmanager, you can choose one or more downloadable files.
If you put a Google API key in the settings, put your geo coordinates in. (Note that a future version will incorporate geocoding).
Sometimes Google is close… but nobody wants to buy the wrong home. Don’t always accept the geocoding provided by mapping software, verify it’s actually pointing at the correct home.
You’re Done!
Now, publish the page. When you view it, you should see at least one tab.
When you return to the Real Estate admin screen, you should see a link to your main listings page, and under the Listings tab you should see your listing.
Going Beyond
If you decide you’d like a photo gallery or video, you may want to install those plugins now and upload some content for your listings. The status screen will show you if everything is correctly set up.
If you’d like a featured homes widget for your home page or sidebar, you can enable the Great Real Estate “Featured Homes Widget” on the plugins panel and then configure it like any other widget.
If you’d like to customize the presentation, stay tuned for details on the template tags. Or dig in now… they are all in templatefunctions.php in the main plugin directory, and there are sample template files (PHP and CSS) in great-real-estate/copytotemplatedir.