[support] Realtor Web Site

[inkfree press]

"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.

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