Displet

In our continuing effort to support the WordPress community, the open source community, and our clients, DispletSearch 1.0 Beta was recently submitted to and accepted by the WordPress Repository. DispletSearch is a fantastic plugin that allows Displet subscribers to easily create quick searches in the sidebar, or more advanced searches in a page. Though still in beta, DispletSearch is extremely stable and feature rich. We’d love to hear feedback from our users, so please contact us at any time!

We just rolled out a new light window, which looks like it’s already increased conversion a bit. The new light window accommodates our Facebook login feature, which is super cool. Facebook login allows users to register or login to your site using their FB credentials. Since most people are logged into Facebook whenever they’re online, this allows them to register or login to your site with a couple of clicks, rather than requiring them to fill out a number of fields. To our knowledge, we’re the only RETS / IDX provider that has this feature. It’s automatically rolled out to our Displet Pro & OnDisplet clients.

To test drive this feature from the visitor’s perspective, check out Stuart St. James implementation (click through to a detail page to login.)

To enable Facebook login, you will need to go through a few steps. It can seem a bit intimidating, but the process is actually relatively easy. Here’s a tutorial on enabling the feature. As always, if anyone has any questions, please contact support and we’ll help you through it.

DispletReader 1.1 is now available and was accepted to the WordPress repository. If you don’t have DispletReader (and are a Displet Pro client) you can get it in your WordPress backend, or download it here. DispletReader 1.1 fixed some minor CSS conflicts with specific themes and added address functionality to the “location” tab. So, if you want to displet the listings for a specific condo, just enter the address and they will all be available.

Google has indicated that they will use +1 data as a ranking metric & everyone is scrambling to add the +1 button to their websites. We thought it would be a great idea to add the +1 button to property details pages. This way, when someone likes a property, they also like your website.

We’re kinda proud of how customizable our system is, so we wanted to show everyone how to add the +1 button in under 3 minutes.

We developed the Phone Number Reminder in anticipation of Facebook login, but it works well for another reason, as well. Phone Number Reminder, well, reminds a user (without a phone number in their profile) that it would be a good idea for them to add the number to their profile, and you can give them any reason you would like, because the message is customizable. We’ve noticed that if you require phone number at registration, many people supply bogus numbers. By “reminding” them for the number every so often, it allows you to show them how valuable your site is (by sending property suggestions, allowing them to save searches, & use your other advanced features) they are more likely to provide a legitimate contact number. Anyways, here’s a quick rundown on the feature:

We’ve finally released DispletReader 1.0! Our kick butt WordPress RETS / IDX app got even better. Check out the tutorial below:

Get ready for a nerdy post!

We have now upgraded our code base & framework to Ruby 1.9.2 and Rails 3.0.3, respectively. This is a fairly large “behind the scenes” improvement and will result in some pretty nice gains on a couple of fronts. First, we should see a reduction in page load time as Rails 3 and Ruby 1.9 are considerably faster. Second, we’ve greatly expanded our cucumber test suite to help us manage bugs. Testing is a great concept heavily utilized in agile development projects (we’re an agile shop.) Code testing slows down code development slightly, but speeds up the project overall. Any time we fix a bug, we write a test for that bug. When we develop new code, we run our suite of tests to ensure that no past bugs have resurfaced. So, in theory, when we fix a bug, it’s the last time our end users will ever see it.

We’re pretty excited that these upgrades are rolled out. We have a backlog of bug fixes & features that have yet to be deployed. Now that this upgrade is deployed, our users will enjoy a short period of extremely rapid development followed by an even stabler system.

We just rolled out another set of bugfixes & enhancements. We received quite a bit of feedback that our thumbnail image resolution was too low. While this helped the images load quickly, they looked a little fuzzy. We’ve now doubled the size of all thumbnail images on import so you’ll see all new thumbnail images coming in with much better resolution.

For those that require registration after a certain number of property detail views, we’ve removed the X out from the login/registration page. In the past, the X was visible, but disabled. We’ve now removed it so there’s no confusion – visitors do not have the option to close the box. Hopefully this will result in a better conversion rate for that light window.

We modified the keyword search field to query more fields. In addition to agent remarks & subdivision, keyword also now queries mls_number, street_name,
street_address, zip, property_type, & view. This will allow third party developers to create some cool quick searches & is also more intuitive for the end user.

Beyond these visible fixes, we had a number of “under the hood” fixes that aren’t readily apparent, but which keep the application lean and mean.

This one was a real pain to debug, but we finally took care of it. Any new images imported from May 6 forward will not have the nasty “gray bar” on the bottom. We’re doubling the resolution of thumbnail images next so that they will look nicer when pulled in from the xml feed and resized.

When we began creating custom & semi-custom websites in 2010, we would take the original DispletReader plugin & modify the horizontal scroller sidebar widget heavily to match the site we designed. This resulted in featured listings management that was in the widget section of the CMS and that looked like this:

Over time, we ended up moving the featured listings to the theme options section of the website, which we felt was a better place to manage them. We also anticipated that upgrading the DispletReader plugin would prove problematic with the heavy customization of the plugin we’d done over time.

We’ve just released a new version of the DispletReader 1.0 RC1 that we think is really sweet (blog post on it coming soon.) Unfortunately, some of our past web design customers won’t be able to use the new plugin without breaking their current site (or without making some major customizations to the plugin, which wouldn’t be efficient.)

We’re offering a “featured listings” upgrade at our programming cost of $100 (total fee) to any site design clients who currently have their featured listings managed in the widget area. We’ll move the featured listings to the theme options so that you can easily upgrade DispletReader in the future – there’s nothing foreseeable that would prevent you from doing so from this point forward.

We have some new cool options to the featured listings theme options, as well, so this turns into a nice upgrade. If you want to let your featured listings run on auto-pilot by entering your agent or office id, you can do so. You can also add additional criteria like price & zip code. So, if you want to feature your office listings above a specific price point in only a few zip codes, that’s available.

We hope everyone likes the new DispletReader plugin!