OpenBroker – Find your Apartment
Development of a multifunctional plugin for real estate brokerage agency, allowing to install the plugin on any site, with absolutely any theme and content, so that any user with a special API subscription can become a brokerage agent with its own site. This plugin was developed specifically for existing real estate agents, as well as to attract new ones and make it easier to develop a website for real estate agencies in Italy.
The main task – to make the most convenient, simple and feature-rich plugin, which will allow to individualize the pages of real estate with the help of pre-saved settings to display both in the catalog and within the posts information about a particular property, with the possibility of detailed review and feedback from customers to the agency.
As a result, the created plugin allows you to turn absolutely any site into an agency literally 5 minutes after installation!
Object directory and filtering
The catalog of objects and the filter form are displayed as separate shortcodes and can be placed independently of each other. The visual style is not overloaded, which allows you to adjust the design of forms and objects to any theme. All filtering functions work in the background via Ajax, without page reloading, with pagination by object.
Filtering options, as well as adjusting the number of elements in a line and the number of characters description can also be set when generating a shortcode in the admin panel, as well as when editing the attributes of the shortcodes themselves on the page where they are displayed.
Object page and feedback
When you go to the object page, you can see the image slider, detailed description, characteristics and all the features of the object for which it may be of interest. It is noteworthy that this information is not stored in the database of the site, but is displayed directly through the API from the remote server. All interaction of the plugin is built directly through the API of the brokerage site. The design and structure were thought through and developed completely from scratch.
When you navigate to a property page, similar properties with common characteristics in the same price range are displayed at the bottom, allowing you to find the properties you want for clients faster, and allowing agencies to increase the likelihood of converting a visitor to a client.
Interested users have the opportunity to use the feedback form with the agency. This message is sent directly to the agent’s account in the OpenBroker system for further processing.
Admin panel – API connection
The main section of the plugin contains fields for saving the API connection settings. The API site is filled in, as well as the access data that agents with a special subscription get on the OpenBroker site. Also at the bottom you select the page that contains the shortcode for detailed information about the object.
Without connecting to the API, the plugin does not work.
Collections – creating object shortcodes
On the collections page, you can not only see which objects are available under certain filters, but also create a shortcode that can be used in the catalog or inside the page and post text. It is in this section that you can set the number of description characters, enable or disable pagination, set the number of elements in the line, as well as the total number of displayed objects. In addition, the selected filters will be preset in the shortcode to display objects according to the preset settings.
At the bottom of the page you can copy the generated shortcode to display the result on the desired page.
List of shortcodes
The page with the list of shortcodes displays all available shortcodes that can be used. When you click on an image, you can see an enlarged format of the image. Each shortcode has a description of where it should be used. Example shortcode of one object is used only once and is set for an individual page, which is selected in the main section of the plugin settings.
Setup instructions
The instructions section describes in detail how to use the plugin, how to configure it and what is needed to access objects from the broker’s website. Absolutely all the necessary information for correct setup, use of the plugin with examples of shortcodes and information on their possible setup.
Results of development
All of the details shown above were developed entirely from scratch, including the design, page layout, and code work architecture. The plugin contains no bugs, has clean code, has been tested and approved in the list of publicly available plugins on wp.org – the official resource for publishing WordPress plugins.