"MichelleX" wrote:
Hey guys -
I know Realtor type web sites have been created using Drupal, but my client has inquired about some things I'm having difficulty finding answers to on the Drupal site. So, I'm hoping someone here may know the answers.
- Is it possible to have a custom IDX option? - Is it possible for users to
save searches and have them emailed to them?
Any ideas are greatly appreciated.
Thanks, Michelle
I totally dig Drupal, so just know that.
However, for two clients in the real estate business, we elected to use Open-Realty and Joomla. The reason is that Open-Realty has a "CMS wrapper mode", where you can tell O-R that you will be "inserting" its content and such into some other CMS.
This does not work with Drupal, because of its 'single index' structure and because of a few other DB technicalities. Rather, it might be more accurate to say: To make O-R work with Drupal was not cost beneficial over other tools to integrate a CMS with Open-Realty.
I would _love_ to continue with our stalled project of creating an integrated O-R/Drupal distribution, or even some form of (complex?) module to handle the mediation between the two.
Another very useful and stable CMS that works just brilliantly with Open-Realty (and Drupal, too!) is pMachine Free. This is still available, is not open source, per se, and is not actively developed (except for a life-time commitment to security issues). The old pMachine became Expression Engine and is very pricey and closed-source. Then pMachine became pMachine Free and is quite cool and easy an we use it with a handful of clients who just love it and won't change (it's very light on its feet, too, so you don't have the slow-down that you get with Drupal.)
Anyway, I've been through the "real estate integration" thing for many hard months, and I think that we've arrived at a solution that maintains an open-source integrity (Open-Realty is not GPL'ed, but it is open-source under its own license, which is minimally requiring of an HTML comment remaining intact.)
I know this isn't exactly in reply to your two questions (which others can handle more accurately). It's just that real estate web sites are so specialized that one needs a dedicated RE tool (I think) to handle the structure of Agents, Offices, Property Classes (types) and so on. It may be better to use some kind of stand-alone tool along with a CMS to get just the mix you want.