Building a real estate site and tools

[vladar]

Hi guys. I did some sites in Joomla and Worpress before and it all worked fine. But now I have something more complex to do and both turned out to be to complicated

It seems that all components are done without consulting people from the trade so I gave up on offered solutions and turned to CCK's and component creators. It could be done but with weeks or even months of hard work so I started searching fore something other than those two mentioned above and here I am.

Is it possible to make with ProcessWire advanced real estate site and management tool with such ease like it is shown in tutorials?

Basic functionality would be:

• listing and search of properties for rent and sale
  
• blog layout display and detail display
  
• gallery for each property
  
• google maps display of location
  
• google maps search
  
• user registration
  
• add to favorites function
  
• send to friend
  
• social share
  
• and so on
  

 

for the agents

• front and back end editing
  
• restricted access to some sensitive informations (like landlords contact details, clients info and so on)
  
• adding property informations with some already defined values in dynamic fields (street names for instance)
  
• Jquery image upload (automatic resize, thumbnail creation, watermark add)
  
• I am sure you get the picture.
  

 

Looking forward to some good news.

Cheers, vladar

PS. Just to get the idea what I need to re-do take a look of the old version of the site. www.hitprom.co.rs

[Joss]

You probably have seen this - but Ryan made this with ProcessWire and it probably answers most of your questions as to what is possible

http://www.villasofdistinction.com/

Original post about it here: http://processwire.com/talk/topic/5335-another-villas-site/

[vladar]

Thanks Joss, I have seen the site before. Great work. Looks and feels great.

After reading the thread you pointed me to I got some answers regarding weather or not it could be done. But most important question is still open. Is it easier to do it with PW than Joomla or WP? Especially for the agents interface side.

[kongondo]

........ But most important question is still open. Is it easier to do it with PW than Joomla or WP? Especially for the agents interface side.

Let's put it this way....if you enjoy microwave dinners, then Joomla or WP is for you. Sometimes the dinner will be easy to cook and may turn out right. On other occassions, the dessert will flop and you will be left frustrated but you will have to do with what you have. If on the other hand, you enjoy having all the ingredients you need and can follow any of several recipes to create some beautiful food with your ingredients, then PW is for you ....

What am I saying? If you want to point and click and solve problems by adding more plugins to the system, Joomla and WP are "good". If you want finely grained control over everything, then PW is for you. However, with PW, some work will be required of you. You will have to be willing to learn....The community will be here to guide you along the way if you ask for help where you are stuck...

Just my 2p (spoken from the point of view of an unashamedly biased PW addict   - but who has been to J and W before...)...Seriously, though, creating a backend admin in PW is not difficult...

Welcome to PW and the forums vladar

[Philipp]

Everything you've mentioned is possible with ProcessWire. If there aren't any complete solutions avaible for Wordpress or Joomla then ProcessWire might be your best choice to build it by yourself. But remember that the great flexiblity comes from building your own "logic" and template rather than using 10 different modules from 10 developers. It takes more time but the result is customized for your problem then.
 
 

Basic functionality would be:

• listing and search of properties for rent and sale
• blog layout display and detail display
• gallery for each property
• google maps display of location
• google maps search
• user registration
• add to favorites function
• send to friend
• social share
• and so on

• Search and list the properties pages. No problem. Example pseudo-code $pages->find('template=house,sale=1");
• Another view option for a list of properties. The detail page could be the template of the property.
• The gallery can be a field with multiple Images or a extra page linked to the property. 
• There is a GoogleMapsMarker Fieldtype. Works fine with some JS libraries for front-end integration.
• Not sure about this one.
• Now we come to the weaker spot of ProcessWire. It's no problem to build a simple signup form and make basic user management. But depending on your requirements you will have to put a lot of effort into this topic.
• Fine if you only need it for a single user/session
• Just HTML/JS magic. No problem and nothing special to ProcessWire
• ...

The backend might be your problem.

for the agents

• front and back end editing
• restricted access to some sensitive informations (like landlords contact details, clients info and so on)
• adding property informations with some already defined values in dynamic fields (street names for instance)
• Jquery image upload (automatic resize, thumbnail creation, watermark add)
• I am sure you get the picture.

1. Backend Editing is no problem. But building a Front-End live editor thing is a huge project. Whole teams are spending weeks developing such functionality for other plattforms.
2. Here you can look into the Module directory. This is possible with PW
3. Not sure. You would define a source for this pre-populated data. Maybe a combination of a simple module and Page-reference field?
4. Image resizing is no problem, neither is the thumbnail creation one. You can add a watermark with Horsts PIM module.

Overall this is a complex project. Especially the front-end editing and the user thing can take some time. A basic system where you can have properties listed with details is easy and should be your first step. If you can invest the time you will get an awesome and flexible site.

Split the project into smaller milestones would be my last suggestion. 

[vladar]

Thanks a lot guys. In J and W forums it takes days for 2 replays usually.

I am not afraid of new knowledge kongondo. Quite the opposite but the fact is I am bit in a hurry since it is my website. It is so old it is hurting my business but I'd really like to do it my self.

Quite new to web development. Unfortunately not so skilled with coding yet. Basic sites gallery-here, about-there, few videos-over there are not problem but I must admit that I am a little intimidated by this project.

Thanks for the support and hope I want annoy you with all help cries in the following weeks. Or months .

[Joss]

As the others have said, the point with ProcessWire is that you end up with exactly the interface and exactly the tools that your client needs, because you build them for them.

The result fits their brand and their need, you are not trying to force them into a compromise.

There are a few of us who have come the Joomla route (and would never go back) and we have all been amazed at how quickly we were able to pick PW up and make something solid with it - even people like me with little programming knowledge.

And of course, any tools you develop as you go, you can keep and reuse on another project!

[slkwrm]

I terms of development and usage standpoint ProcessWire is much better suited  for the task then Joomla, Wordpress and even Drupal. But you have to be ready to invest your time in learning some concepts of PW. There are a few of them: page, pageArray, selector, template, template file, field, and module. If you feell comfortable with OOP PHP, CSS and HTML, you will definetely succeed. Of course it will requre some custom coding as with any more or less complex project.

I'll try to make some assessment here in terms of efforts required if you have the skills mentioned above:

• listing and search of properties for rent and sale - easy
• blog layout display and detail display - very easy
• gallery for each property - very easy
• google maps display of location - easy with existing module (some work is required if you need more complex integration)
• google maps search - (not quite sure what you mean here) I guess it depends on what parameters you want to search, should require some coding
• user registration - user access control is coming out of-the-box, you just need to customise it for your needs and make registration and login forms for your front end.
• add to favorites function- easy
• send to friend - easy
• social share - some coding requred - I think there are open source social sharing projects you could integrate for this (like this one)
• and so on - it depends, but I think the rest is super-easy

• front and back end editing - back-end editing is already here. But front-end editing is what you will have to code yourself. So I suppose could require fair amount of work.
• restricted access to some sensitive informations (like landlords contact details, clients info and so on) - it depends on the logic of your site, I guess you will have to code some parts.
• adding property informations with some already defined values in dynamic fields (street names for instance) - from easy to medium, but more info would help.
• Jquery image upload (automatic resize, thumbnail creation, watermark add) - all is here (thanks @Apeisa and @smd) including watermarks (thanks to @Horst)
• I am sure you get the picture.

Unless you have a strict deadline go with Processwire - it will worth the effort in any possible sense. If it's your first project with PW, it may be not the easiest journey, but an exciting one. In the end you will aquire some great skills and have many insights. And I'm sure, after you've arrived you will never look back .

Whereas you arguably could start faster with Drupal (that I think the only competitive CMS option here) dropping some plugins together, you then would almost inevitable struggle with your front-end markup and in general making all work the way you (and not Drupal) want. And again you have to be familiar with Drupal's internals to make those hacks. In PW you develope naturally extending existing functionality and it doesn't make any assumptions about your workflow and markup. So it gives you more rewarding experience during the development process. Almost all the skills you get using PW is transferable to other webdev areas.

From the UX point of view PW's interface is a dream coming true (and Drupal is a nightmare IMHO). If you haven't seen PW 2.4 yet, just go and have a look - it's beautiful!

[adrian]

Wow guys - what an amazing set of answers to this question. Glad I wasn't around and didn't try to answer this - I would have felt quite inadequate. 

Gotta love this community