Clearskys.net Blog

Property Hounds site launches today

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

After a lot of hard work (including in no small part blood, sweat and tears) I am proud to announce the launch of the new Property Hounds web site. The new site is a re-development of an old framed Frontpage web site which came complete with, amongst other things, a home directory of 6000+ pages and images.

The site is now powered by WordPress version 2.2.3 and features a custom designed theme (which I have lovingly called HoundDog). The non-blog functionality of the site is accomplished with the use of the following main plugins:

• Clearskys Availability Calendar - This plugin is being used primarily for the booking administration features, as we are using the Calendar widget to display the booked dates.
• Clearskys Enquiry and contact form - Displayed in the footer of every properties page to capture rental enquiries
• Clearskys Availability Calendar widget - The calendar widget displays the availability calendar at the left hand side of every properties page.
• Clearskys Property plugin - This plugin has turned into something of an all-encompassing monster. It handles the majority of the sites property administration and display functionality from displaying property details through to handling the search and tag results. At the moment this plugin is not generic enough for general use, so I will be releasing a cut down and simpler version very soon, and will then work towards adding more functionality in later releases.
• cforms II - Used for the Contact Us and Management services forms, to keep the standard contact separate from rental enquiries.
• Excerpt Editor - A life saver, this plugin re-adds the ability to customise excerpts on pages. Why this is not available in the standard WordPress I do not know.
• IP 2 Nation - Changes the telephone number based on the country the visitor is from.
• Samsarin PHP widget - Used to display the More Information menu on the side of each page (allows me to call the Sticky Menu plugin for the relevant menu).
• Sticky Menu - Allows more flexible control over the Main and More Information menus.
• CSS Compress - This plugin automatically removes the comments from and GZIP’s your themes main CSS file (style.css) when it is called. It successfully reduced my main CSS file down to 5k (from 18k).

I still have quite a bit of functionality to add to the site, so time permitting, I will try to put together some quick tutorials on how we accomplished certain parts of this site and how we will go about adding the new bells and whistles.

One last word, this is now a Live site, so please don’t enquire about a property unless you really want to rent it.