Some things take time as a result of indecision and inefficiencies. Other things deliberately take time, because they are aimed at being perfect, and developed specifically to outperform anything else that could be deemed as competition.
In recent months, you may have been able to criticize us for a *supposed* lack of updates, theme releases at a fast rate & maybe even innovation. But we have been quietly working on things that will absolutely blow your mind, and the best news is that these will be available to you within the next 6 – 8 weeks.
First up, we have a brand-new real estate theme that will revolutionize the way you are building these type of websites with WordPress at the moment. On show today, is Realtor:
Using the latest functionality available in WP 3.0, we’ve developed something that will be of real value. And beyond this being “just another theme”, we’re also planning some very exciting additions & tweaks to our business model in a way that will influence the way you use WooThemes greatly.
For the moment, let’s just say that Realtor has been built using a the WooFramework + a new, little (!?) add-on.
100 Responses to “Realty Reality”
awesome
– Im assuming this will take advantage of Custom Post types?
This will be a hot seller.
Custom post types extreme
This is a good move. As an idea – for the next niche theme could be a jobs board.
Is there a market for a jobs board you think?
I agree with some sort of job board yes. Rather than just a theme that displays posts to look like job posting, maybe have some function built in that match to a users preference. Something where a user can select the fields they are looking for jobs in and it brings them a match of the potential jobs?
Definitely a market for a Jobs Board, but I’d much rather see it as a woo plugin than a theme.
I’m no expert, but I’d be surprised if there wasn’t a market for a modern WP jobs board.
Hi Magnus,
There is definitely a market for a Jobs board, but it depends on who the question is directed to.
If you have a look at any local local paper, there are four big sections. Real estate, cars, classifieds and Jobs.
But real estate and cars websites would be good for developers that resell websites to others, as you have many businesses to sell to, whilst jobs and classifieds I feel would be direct sales to web site owners who seek to make money online.
The other profession that would buy a website customised by a developer would be Mortgage Brokers.
not a bad idea, but I would recommend a very flexible theme for restaurants with menue, daily menue, special offers…. the most businesses out there are some for eat & drink.
This would serve a lot of people for sure.
I’ll second that. A killer restaurant theme would be amazing for me. As of now, I plan to use City Guide for my restaurant guide but would love to also offer individual restaurants a nice solution with some nice menu integration, a special coupon download section/feature, “find us” section etc.
Hear hear. Added to our to do list!
I would like to second a restaurant theme, as well as add a request for a political web 2.0 communications theme for candidates running for public office. After all, elections are coming up again in Nov.
@John – How would you define a political theme? Features you’d include?
“@John – How would you define a political theme? Features you’d include?”
I would define a political theme as containing all of the communications for a candidate’s platform on the web.
In addition to a blog for the campaign trail, they would also have pages dedicated to their positions on issues. Candidate history/background. Campaign content/news rotator. Social network integration. Press Release Center. Media Center – photos, tv ads/videos, etc… Campaign donations. Volunteer sign ups. Contact form for supporters which puts them on a list for a newsletter. Default theme style would be some variation of red/white/blue. President Obama’s site was nice when he was campaigning. The White House site has a gorgeous design now as well.
Noted and added to our potential to do.
very good idea. With everyone looking for jobs there have been many job searching websites pop up.
this, ecommerce, classified ads, forums,,, from Woo would be almost “perfection”.
New excellent idea!
Guys,
Just a heads up, the word “REALTOR” is a trademark of the National Association of Realtors and they’re ruthless when it comes to protecting it. Example: http://www.inman.com/news/2007/10/3/nar-requests-name-change-realtorgenius-blog
I do look forward to seeing your real estate theme in action. It was the one theme type I couldn’t wait to see WooThemes tackle and now I’m excited to see it in the works!
Pfff… Seems like such a generic word and surprised that anyone would have been able to register a trademark as such. Thanks anyway for letting us now!
We’ll be getting legal advice on this and will proceed from there.
Here’s more info on their website: http://www.realtor.org/letterlw.nsf/pages/TrademarkLogoFAQs
As a real estate agent, I can confirm that they are RUTHLESS when it comes to the term “Realtor.”
Wow, that’s whack. It IS a generic term in every day usage now like attorney or doctor. The USPTO needs to revoke that nonsense pronto.
Confirmed, you just don’t want to go down this road. Avoid the use of REALTOR in your name, change it now before it becomes more difficult to do so.
How on earth can “realtor” be a registered trademark? It’s too generic. I don’t know of a single site, hyper-local or broad, that doesn’t use it all over the place.
Please, wisely plan sizes of Ad Spaces / Banners
The most popular and profitable and most requested are 728×90 and 300×250
Thanks.
Waiting for a theme.
Regards,
Igor.
You pretty much have the theme’s non-”Realtor(tm)” name down already! Just call it “Realty Check.” ‘Nuff said.
We’ll consider that one along with a few other that we’ve brainstormed internally.
looking forward to this one, when do we get to learn more about it? Will we be able to add squeeze pages? And customize colors? Too many questions, I’ll be quiet now and wait for the theme!
Squeeze pages? I have no idea what this is…
And yes, we will be include a few design controls – especially related to colours – in the backend. So you’ll be able to play with those.
Realtor should be available early next week.
Sorry, I might have used the incorrect term. Maybe a landing page, or island page? A page template that allows us to skip any navigation at all so that we can make special offers, but the main menu is not visible on the page. For instance, I could make a special pitch to a single home seller, and name a page just for his house, but the page wouldn’t be visible on any menus for other people to see, and he couldn’t see how to navigate to the main site, he would just be stuck on my single page.
I will definitely be coming back next week to check it out.
I saw below you said that you weren’t going to be integrating IDX, I’ll be interested in seeing how we should use the theme without it, since IDX search is always the most visited page on my current website.
As mentioned, IDX isn’t something we’ll be integrating at the moment, but this is most definitely a consideration down the line. At this stage, it’s important for us to get Realtor out into the wild and get you guys & girls to use it before we even consider to make tweaks and / or additions.
Sweet!
Love the new Woo-Ninja too.
More info on the new ninja soon…
Lack of updates? Just immediate compatibility with custom menus was a big enough update for me by far, but it’s not like you guys stopped there.
Good sirs and madams, I laugh at your humbleness.
Hehe, thanks for the kind words!
And note: we have no madams on our team, unless you’re confusing Foxinni with his sometimes-pretty-long hair…
I’m more Rockstar than you…
Hairmetal FTW!
Will there be a new video blog theme to blow our minds?
I agree with Kristasphere, with the custom post types I would love to see a video blog theme, I believe there is a huge market.
Noted.
Would to know what you & @Kristaphere think in terms of features that would blow your mind?
#1 A “side blog” or “asides” page for the occasional written post, AND a widget to be able to show the latest 2 -3 posts on the homepage
#2 The option to automatically have the most recent video show in the “big screen” WITHOUT having to put it in a category, or remember to tag it each time. This drives me insane! If you are doing a video blog, why wouldn’t you want your most recent ep showing in the big screen?
#3 Don’t have the video titles covering up the thumbnails, like they do in WooTube.
hey, is there gonna be a bbpress forum theme bundled with this theme?
This isn’t in the plans unfortunately.
How would a bbPress theme add value in this regard?
I looked at designing a site for a realtor a few months back, but quickly hit a wall when it came to being able to incorporate their MLS service (home search/db feature). It’s something all realtors have to have, but trying to incorporate it into WordPress is nigh to impossible, much less affordable. That industry is a pain in the ass to work with, I know first hand, because of all the legalities and red tape bs.
We had a look at both MLS & IDX integration when developing Realtor and decided that neither was an option; especially not for the first version of the theme. Both of these systems seem incredibly rigid which – as you have rightly noted – makes integration extremely difficult.
A lot of newer IDX companies (www.diversesolutions.com and http://www.displet.com for example) are WordPress friendly. I’ve used both of the aforementioned services and DS integrates with your site on a full width page using javascript. Displet is similar with WordPress plug-ins.
(I’m a developer at Diverse Solutions)
@Josh Diverse Solutions actually has a home-search WordPress plugin: http://www.dsidxpress.com
Hey Josh –
Thanks for the mention. We have a number of plugins that integrate pretty nicely with WordPress – sidebar quick searches, featured listing scrollers, featured listing page view, statistics, etc… We’d love to talk w/ WooThemes about integration for any themes – we’ve used the sidebar quick search to incorporate some pretty sweet home page quick searches – http://metrolivingrealtors.com for example.
~EB
I’m jacked about this theme, please don’t tease us! We real estate folks have been subjected to enough crappy themes, roll out the Woo real estate theme stat!
Hehe, sorry for simply teasing. Good news is however that the theme will be ready early next week.
That’s great news! The real estate theme cannot get here fast enough. I’m really hoping you will release it sooner. Previous comments are correct about the term Realtor® being a protected mark (I am a member of the National Association of Realtors, as well as state and local associations). However, don’t let that deter you from getting a great theme out quickly. Your post title (Realty Reality) or something related to the functionality that you are building into the theme would make a fine theme name.
Thanks for confirming this.
We’re considering both legal advice and alternative names at the moment. Neither of these will also be a setback to a release date early next week.
Hi,
really looking forward to the release of this theme.
Just wondered, will it be able to generate a custom XML file
for the listings in a seperate folder (to be specified on the option pages) ? You know, where the custom post type tags would be the XML tags ?
That would be sweet…
Also very curious about the Iphone App
We haven’t had a look at the XML possibilities yet, but we’d assume that this should be possible.
And the iPhone app is so close now…
I would love to see an even more advanced version of Canvas that has full custom post type support, and custom views (how the posts appear on a page) support for:
Videos
Podcasts
Images
Books
Music
DVDs
Or, maybe add all these things to you already excellent WooFramework + a plugin that gives us all these Custom Post Types pre-made.
Custom post types are of no good value though, if you’re not also making custom post views for them. If they all look like plain blog posts, they have no real value.
As an example, Podcasts look’n feel should be a table of some sort, with columns for title, author, date, lenght, play icon, download icon and maybe a subscribe icon (link).
Books could contain lots of the same, though with a few tweaks here and there.
I know there are a few plugins out there that gives some of the functionality, but they don’t let you customize the view easy. All of that has to be done manually. So as I said, Custom post types neeeds their own view in order to be really usefull.
Just a few suggestions.
You guys rock, as always!
Regards
Kristoffer
On the subject of Canvas (which I use and love), it would be great if it had an integrated bbpress theme. I’d pay extra fir it!
Amen! Hallelujah!
Also,
Would love to see support for CU3ER flash plug-in, in the WooFramework. I think CU3ER is really awesome as a slideshow plugin!
Ouch. NO FLASH.
There are jQuery alternatives to cu3er.
Anyone come to your mind?
Would be very interested in a jQuery/html5 plugin for wordpress, that can do the same as cu3er can.
Cu3er is awesome, even if it’s flash based.
So I assume it would be prudent not to waste any money on a purchase at this moment? I wanted to buy the Canvas theme, however, if there is going to be a major upgrade to the Framework that will include functionality with ALL the new 3.0 features and not just Menus then I am stuck waiting. Nothing has gone right for me since I decided to move my 10 blog network to WP from Blogger. After researching and testing literally over 500 themes I decided on Canvas and now; another waiting game. It amazes me that with all the lead time available to theme developers because of the never-ending 3.0 Beta that themes would be compliant but very few are. Good luck to me. WP is the only platform I know that requires a writer to be a developer too. It’s like buying a car only if you know how to fix it. Sheesh.
No need to wait, you get any updates Woo will make, and they do a great job of support.
I use Canvas on http://www.templeofipad.com, and it’s great. You can modify pretty much any aspect of the look, with no coding knowledge.
We never claim that you have to be a developer to buy our themes
Canvas works with WP 3.0 now, and there isn’t any planned updates to the theme in the near future.
If we add functionality to the framework, which is used in all our themes, it will only affect the themes that make use of this new functionality.
Very excited at the prospect of future niche themes. For my 2 cents they not only show off the power of the woo/wordpress framework, but also create a “business model in a box” solution for designers to offer their clients.
I would love to see the ability to use jquery to accomplish multi-sort of the content via custom taxonomies.
example:
1. sort out the output via price/location/type etc.
A great example of this in action, although not a real-estate site is
http://www.fancast.com/full_episodes
If you click on any of the sort fields on the left the content pane updates automatically.
I have managed something similar but would love to see how the ninja’s do it. To date there is a complete lack of any documentation on wordpress on how to accomplish multi-sort taxonomies. A real-estate/video/podcast/etc theme without multi-sortable taxonomies is kind of a waste of time.
Hope the suggestion makes it into the themes in the future.
p.s.
This also goes to an example of what a kick butt video theme from woo would be like as you were requesting examples of a great video theme.
See my comment here: http://www.woothemes.com/2010/07/realty-reality/#comment-36073
I believe we’ll satisfy those suggestions of yours…
I see how you have the post-types + taxonomies on the backend. That part I understand. What I was requesting was the ability on the front end for the user to be able to sort the properties shown via multi-taxonomies using jquery or something similar like the site I referenced above does.
Ah, gotcha now.
This won’t be in V1, nope.
This was the question I was trying to ask below – so front end users wont be able to filter their property search be different fields such as price, size, no. of bedrooms and the narrowed down results show up?
It will be filtered yes, as the search functionality allows for that. But when the listings are displayed, you won’t be able sort (ASC or DESC) for any of these criteria’s.
The theme will be out tomorrow; so your best bet is to check it out then and give us feedback for V2.
a HUGE BUMMER on this one then….
Sorry, I was just hoping that you guys were able to solve a fundamental problem that I have been working on for weeks now.
In the end it’s all about the user experience for me.
So with this theme, how is an end-user going to search for a home that is 3 bedrooms, 2 baths, a garage, and in a specific city and price range?
(above example is if the bedrooms, baths, garage, price, and city are all separate taxonomies)
anyhow, I think you get the point…
The theme should be released in the coming days so you can have a look at how it works before discussing further
Check the release tomorrow…
Search is advanced and has advanced search criteria. V1 may not be perfect, but it’s gonna be awesome!
I recently built a real estate theme based on Canvas that takes advantage of custom post types and the Woo meta boxes. So I’m really excited to see what you guys come out with for this new theme.
Here’s some of my speculations for how it might work (video screencast): http://wptheming.com/2010/07/woo-real-estate-speculation/
That looks great Devin and is similar to what we’ve done. But… Realtor is on steriods…
Here’s a few more teasers…
* Custom post types: http://cl.ly/b52534e55133e2692a6c
* Custom post listings: http://cl.ly/53b544afcda7c2910b39
* Google Maps: http://cl.ly/b2c7e578a0e3e44e0cd5
* Custom taxonomy: http://cl.ly/9b5a0f0cffb351d452b6
I will never use a theme like this, but wow, you guys really are harnessing the power of WordPress.
Your users are right regarding the REALTOR trademark. Some people may think it is a generic term, but it’s actually a trademark and the organization is very ruthless in how they protect it.
There is a difference between using a trademarked term in casual conversation or when referring to a real estate agent AND using that term as the name of a product you are selling.
You guys should really look into this before launching the release version. I’d avoid using that name if it was me.
I don’t know if this was intentional, but I think it’s cool that the theme is described as something of “real” value.
See below.
To everyone that has noted to us that Realtor is a registered term, thanks for notifying us as we obviously didn’t know about this before (I mean, how the hell would any organization be able to trademark a generic word, but anyway…).
We are not legal professionals, so we are awaiting advice from our legal team before we will make a decision in this regard. So we won’t be rash and we are not looking for a fight.
Really looking forward to getting my hands on this!
Want to adapt it for a different sort of property will I be able to change the features listed eg instead of bedroom and garages could I have type of roof covering etc?
Hehe – good question.
Those features all reside in a custom taxonomy, so it’s as easy as adding the features you wish to the taxonomy and then just tagging your property posts accordingly.
next up… car dealership theme.
i’d sell a crap-ton of these if you built the template.
Are users going to be able to search listings by multiple terms eg by price, location, number of bathrooms?
Most definitely!
Because Realtor includes custom taxonomies, it is possible to search all of those taxonomies & specific custom fields to find certain listings. We’ve also had to rewrite the native search functionality completely to accomplish this.
Am i the only one why is missing some CMS themes? I would new CMS style themes
In the last couple of months, we’ve released Inspire, Apz, Diarise & Boast which would all qualify with regards to your “CMS” definition I’d like to believe. What else would you like to see?
This theme puts you so close to a business directory. Food for thought
Are you saying there’s a potential mashup of CityGuide & Realtor in the works?
Mmm…
I know it’s been beaten to death but MLS/IDX integration would be a miracle worth your time and effort. We’ll all be holding our breath for some huge advance in WooTechnology or some sort of partnership between Woo and a super rad IDX company for V2 of this bad-ass theme.
Looking forward to tomorrow…it’s like Christmas Eve around my house tonight. Off to light a cinnamon candle and drink some eggnog.
Hehe.
IDX is definitely something that we’ll try to tackle in future versions, but we wanted to get this version out there first (which is amazingly awesome in its own right) to see how you guys & girls end up using it.
I know this has been beaten to death, but don’t use the word Realtor. You don’t need to run it by legal, it’s a trademarked term and the NAR *will* defend it. Trust me, they do it ALL the time.
Yes, it’s a “generic” common term. So is Kleenex and Xerox and Frisbee and a ton of other words in the lexicon. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be a trademark. It is, plain and simple. A “realtor” isn’t someone that helps people buy and sell homes. A realtor is a member of the National Association of Realtors. And not all real estate agents are Realtors.
Yes, it’s stupid and it makes no sense. But there are people at the NAR that do nothing but send cease & desist letters for the improper use of the trademarked term Realtor.
Already changed
Will you implement some of the Google maps features from City Guide? Would be nice, to have Map pins of different property categories, and to show maps with the featured property + alternatives nearby.
Seems like there’s much from City Guide that can be reused.
Google Maps has been integrated and we’ll definitely be upgrading this functionality in future versions (once we see how everyone is using it and what features could possibly be added).
Will it have a paypal intergration ? Can users upload there own property ?? Or will it be have to be done manual?
Well since everybody is getting a word in about future concepts because, WE ABSOLUTELY LOVE THIS, how about an Events Directory & Listings based theme. (Keeping fingers crossed tightly….)
Better yet, any tweaks you have in mind to the WooFramework could encompass ‘stuff’ and ‘secret juice’ that allows you to release a Directory Theme and allow the user to create custom types (Events, Local Business, Restaurants) using the Framework. U did bring about custom menus before it became official so I have faith!!!!
Waiting for the new business models too…. (Don’t make us pay too much more….)
Noted.
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