We have a major update to the realivent wordpress CMA Plugin, I'd like to say it when from "great" to "Holy Cow, this is awesome".

The biggest improvement is the new feature that allows people to guess on future home values. A new form has been added to the plugin that allows people to choose a future date anywhere from tomorrow to years from now and then enter a price that they think the property will be valued at. The valuation is coming from Zillow, just like the old plugin.

What makes this such a valuable tool, is that when the future date arrives for the estimation, that user gets an email with a link to see the results back on your website. This means constant traffic coming back to your website! Even if they completely forget about you, they will be reminded to go back to your site and see how good they are at guessing prices.

It is really a lot of fun.
Screenshots:

get your gallery at realiventblog.com

This feature is in beta and you can turn it off in the admin section. All data is stored and we will be producing data trends based on the guesses. This data will not be available immediately because we do not have that much data, but as we start seeing some interesting trends we will release the data. The data will be release in the plugin also, so the public will stay on your site (sticky) and see how the world is estimating values.

Since Zestimates update about every 2 weeks, if you enter a future date in the near future and the Zestimate has not been updated, an email will get sent out telling the person that made the estimate that the value has not changed, and they will get another email as soon as it does. 

Along with this feature we have improved many other features:

1. Better look and feel. Of course you can also edit the code to fit your website.
2. Along with the default sidebar widget, we added a function to pull out the form so you can skin with you own sidebar container. See screenshot above.
   to skin, call the form with this function: <?PHP get_cma_widget_form() ?>
3. better results. Removed many of the errors from missing data.
4. added a permalink to the results. You can now get the permalink and use as a reference when blogging about house values, or send to clients in emails. Here is an example of the permalink: Upcoming auctions in Oakland, CA

Download the plugin here: Realivent CMA plugin

typical plugin install, upload entire folder to your plugin directory, and activate. Go to options->realivent cma to configure. The Options page will make a new wordpress page automatically. To add the widget, go to presentation0>sidebar widgets and drag the realivent cma widget to your sidebar. 

I love the lightbox javascript library, but I was having the hardest time getting it to work with Wordpress. I finally figured it out with some help from these plugins

http://zeo.unic.net.my/notes/lightbox2-for-wordpress/

http://www.4mj.it/lightbox-js-v20-wordpress/ 

Here is a sample of ours:

get your gallery at realiventblog.com

The problem I found with all the other lightbox plugins was that they had no image uploader so I had to make the gallery and maually add the lightbox viewer. So I added an uploader and an easy way to add the gallery to the blog post or blog page.

Admin Sections:

get your gallery at realiventblog.com

To install the plugin, upload the entire lightbox_gallery folder to your plugin directory. Then activate it. The admin section will be under the options tab as "Lightbox".

Download: lightbox_gallery.zip 

How to Use:

1. Make a gallery. All photos have to go into a gallery so first thing to do is "add gallery". Once you add a gallery, you can upload images to it. You can delete and move the photos from one gallery to another in the edit section.
2. Once you have a gallery, just add [GALLERY=X] where X is the gallery id. The gallery id will be visible in the admin section. It must be capitalized!

Notes:

If you upload an image that is smaller then the desired max width, the image will not be resized.
It seems the page has to fully load before the lightbox will work. I'm looking into this.
If there is other javascript on the page, like a mybloglog widget or meebo, the lightbox will appear behind it…I'm working on this…no biggie, IMO.

It looks a lot better in Safari and Firefox, then IE7…but then again, most things do!
Safari, is quickly becoming my new favorite browser.