The other night I could not sleep. I had a my weekly technology class at KWSFP in the morning so the stress from having to get up early probably made it impossible for me to relax. So around 3 in the morning, I got out of bed and started to tinker with the plugins. I try to make the plugins as easy to use, but still give enough freedom to extend and use them in ways that I don’t think of.

The Featured listing plugin works great, I love it…but some people are finding it difficult to use, so I fixed it.

The old steps.

1. download plugin from my website, unzip and upload to your websites plugin folder
   This is straight forward…can’t make this much easier, unless we create a tool that allows direct access to your plugin folder over the internet…hmmm…this might be possible, I’m looking into this. Maybe a download manager or firefox extension.
2. In the admin section, activate the plugin
3. go to options, and click on the featured listing link
4. add your realivent account, and configure how you want to display your listingsThis is where is starts getting confusing.
5. Now, you have to make the page to display the listings. Go to write->page in the admin section
6. switch to HTML mode and enter the code snippet <!–Featured Listings–>
   Note*, this will not work: <!–featuredlistings–>, or this <!–FEATURED LISTINGS–>
   It is case sensitive.
7. publish page and your featured listings should now be displayed on your blog.

The new steps.

1. steps 1 through 4 are the same…so we are currently in the configuration section of the Featured listings.
2. Instead of having to go and write a page, I now create one from the featured listing configuration. Now you do not have to worry about entering
   <!–Featured Listings–>

   . It is done for you. You can also update the page from this plugin. To delete the page, you have to go to manage->pages. If the page is deleted, the next time you access the plugin admin section all the configuration settings will be removed from the Wordpress option datatable. In the configuration section, you give the page a title, and choose the page template. Some themes come with multiple page templates. We suggest using a full page template to display your listings.

When you go to manage pages, you will see the code added to the page to display listings. You can manage and edit the page just like any other page in your blog. I’m updating all the plugins to do the same thing…I’ve finished the home search IDX frame plugin, and the featured listing plugin, they have both beth updated in the plugin and widget section of this blog.

As always, your comment and feature requests are always welcome.

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