I get these little status update emails from the developer at vieleRETS and the latest one stuck out for me because of the changes to the way mapping for target solutions is being dealt with. For those that follow any of my half dozen other blogs you can easily pick out that I’m extremly biased toward WordPress as a real estate website solution. In fact, most of the articles I publish deal with WordPress as a CMS for Real Estate Websites. But the new vieleRETS features have changed my attitude a great deal after spending some time in an application called iProperty for Joomla.
iProperty is a product developed by Tim and Vince Kramer at The Thinkery designed to put real estate listings into a Joomla website with relative ease. vieleRETS has been used on numerous projects involving iProperty websites and due to the demand for RETS integration into iProperty – the people at vieleRETS are adding a new schema specifically for iProperty users.
vieleRETS has mapping schemas for Open-Realty, Orodha, CSV and SQL and they are expanding the code to map iProperty and possibly the Interactive Tools listings manager. Like a television commercial there is always a “But Wait, if you act now, something else will happen blah blah blah…” as you will see. After a brief discussion with the top dog on the project, he revealed to me that vieleRETS is planning to publish a database model for real estate websites as a pre-defined structure that can be easily modified by developers who build real estate web sites. This new turnkey model will be based on years of experience in building real estate websites and will include all tables and data fields necessary for a modern real estate website. I wont go into the tables at this time but any developer looking at them would be quite pleased that the bridge between RETS data and a good RDB structure is being built.
How cool is that? vieleRETS, the easiest to use of all RETS tools available for the PHP platform is going to provide foundation code for building custom real estate websites. Naturally such code does not replace any of the turnkey applications on the market but it does provide a foundation for custom projects.
