Clearskys.net Blog

Introducing StayPress

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After a great deal of work, I am pleased to introduce a sneak peek at the new StayPress system.

StayPress is a collection of plugins that will turn a standard vanilla installation of WordPress or WordPress MU into a property management and bookings system. Of course when I say Property, I actually mean any bookable resource of which there is a finite availability. So the StayPress system will be able to manage property rentals, hotel room rentals, conference rooms and centres, B and B’s, training rooms, bands, etc…

The new StayPress system takes over from the previous clearskys.net collection of plugins and brings everything together into a more manageable and co-ordinated group.

Whilst there will obviously be a downloadable version of the StayPress plugins, we are also planning a hosted version of the system for those who do not want the trouble of running their own website.

If you would like to be kept informed of updates and our release dates then please subscribe to either this sites RSS Feed or visit StayPress.com and subscribe to the StayPress only blog.

StayPress is in no way affiliated with Automattic or WordPress, other than being built on one of the best web CMS systems around.

The First Santa run in Spain

On the morning of Sunday 2nd December 2007, the peace of the Spanish sea side town of Torrevieja will be disturbed by the ringing of bells and the shouts of “Ho Ho Ho” as 200+ Santa Clauses take part in a 5km fun run in aid of the A.E.C.C. (The main Cancer charity in Spain).

Why am I mentioning this? Well mainly because I will be one of those Santas who complete with red outfit, hat and fake beard will be attempting to make it from one end of Torrevieja sea front to the other and back again without causing myself too much damage.

If you are feeling particularly generous or charitable then please consider sponsoring my heroic attempt by clicking on the Donate button below (yes, I am aware that 5km isn’t a long distance, but attempting to get from my current sedentary lifestyle to finishing a 5km run in the space of 5 weeks is not something I am looking forward to ).

All generous sponsors will get a big thank you, and a mention and link on this post (unless they wish to remain anonymous). You can let me know what text and/or link and how much detail you would like in your entry by entering the details on the payment form. If you are particularly kind then please point the readers of your own blog here.
You can use this handy calculation device if you want to calculate what charges PayPal will take from your donation prior to sending it.

Sponsors so far

€25.00 - Anne Marie Gravil - PatronesMentales.com
€10.00 - From Zoe, Ryan and the crew at IndependentOwners.com

Property Hounds site launches today

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.

MyDashboard takes second place

We are proud to announce that the MyDashboard WordPress plugin took second place in the recent Weblog Tools Collection plugin competition.

MyDashboard is a WordPress plugin that replaces the current WordPress dashboard with an Ajax homepage style of dashboard, in the style of iGoogle, Pageflakes and Netvibes.

We have a lot of exciting things planned for future releases of MyDashboard, so stay tuned for more details.

This post is a little bit late, as the competition winners were announced late last month (August 26th) but unfortunately things got on top of me so it never got posted.

I’ve posted it now to pass on my congratulations to the other winners (and indeed thanks to all the entrants for writing such useful plugins - a good few I am now using on this blog), but mainly to thank Mark and the judges at Weblog Tools collection for holding such a well run competition.

Announcing catral.propertyhounds.com

I am pleased to announce phase 1 of the new Property Hounds Catral website. Powered by Wordpress and the clearskys.net plugins collection. After a lot of work it is now ready for the public to use.

Amongst other things, the site utilises:

• A custom designed Wordpress theme.
• The enquiry and contact form plugin on all property pages
• Availability calendar widget on property pages
• Booking and availability calendar plugin
• New property based plugin functionality including:
  • Property referencedrop down widget
  • Property image list for tag widget
  • Property search form
  • Property Tag cloud
  • Results lists plugin
  • Refine criteria widget
  • Property details plugin

I will go into more detail on the construction of this site in later posts, and maybe feature some tutorials to show some of the techniques I used. If you want to know about a specific bit of functionality, then let me know.

I will also be adding more functionality in the next few days/weeks including map plugins and some other little bits of functionality.

Please note: This is a LIVE site, so please DO NOT send enquiries unless you really want to rent a property.